(the 3  leaders of the french Wordpress community, enjoying a paecefull moment near the cactus @ lacantine

That was the title of my presentation during yesterday’s Wordpress Barcamp in Paris. Slides are available here, and I’ll be writting about the subject soon (either here or elsewhere, maybe on Mashable France)…

The French WP community is pretty cool, lots of interesting people and projects, and great photographs, I loved le-hiboo.com’s work (few ego-sample below)

(never looked so good on pictures, thank again to le-hiboo.com)

See you soon @ another barcamp (or just for a drink)

tag: wordcampparis

Ardoise is the name of the new database used by the french police to record crimes and day to day activity. If your car is stolen, you’ll get your record, if your stereo was too loud during your last birthday party, you also have a record, and of course, if you murdered somebody, you’re also gonna get your personal record, in fact, if you ever have anything to do with the french police, you’ll get your record.

So what’s wrong with it? Well… It you’re gay, you’re going to be flagged as a gay in the database (or if your a union delegate, or a transexual, etc).

Not really helpfull today, since gays in France are not really in any danger… but stay with me.

During the 1930s, in the Netherlands, the government decided they should give money to various church and in order to give an amout in relation to the size of each religion in the country, they filed every protestant, catholic and jew in the country… just to count.

Can you guess what happenend a few years later when the Nazis invaded the country?

One more thing: can you trust the french police? Same answer. During WW2, law and Nazi order was maintained in France by only a few thoursand Nazi soldiers… and the help of the french police (compare that to the 160k US soldier in Irak, a much smaller country).

Not surprisingly, one of the main police union (Synergie) in France told the press they ‘were not shoked’…

Looks like propaganda 2.0 is going to be difficult.

After seing those shocking photos of a supposed pro Tibet assaulting a athlete, Chinese blogger looked at thousands of picture trying to ID the guy and realised… he was part of the pro-Chinese crowd.

(via Kelblog)

Anybody looking for some insights about the current ‘war on terror’ should definitely have a look at this movie. Beside being a pretty good Hollywook blockbuster, this ‘based on a true story’ screenplay gives a detailled explanation on how and when Al Qaida was funded and created and how funds dramaticaly dropped once the CIA reached it’s goals, failing badly, for the decades to come (century ?).

Check the IMDB ratings, it’s worth it.

“une jeune porteuse paralympique de la Torche a attiré l’attention des médias en raison de sa bravitude“

Fantastique, la propagande Chinoise reprend le vocabulaire de Ségolène Royal, laissant apparaitre une lueur d’espoir sur nos chances de médailles dans la catégorie Langue de bois.

L’athlète, qui a pensé un temps attaquer Pékin pour violation des droits d’auteurs et contrefaçon de marque, a finalement renoncé ‘afin de favoriser le dialogue juste’.

Nathalie Kosciusko Morizet, récemment disqualifiée pour une violation innaceptable à la discipline de la langue de bois, et dont les chances de médailles sont réduites à néant, voit le retour de Ségolène Royal sur le devant de la scène avec amertume.

Merci aux Sponsors / Thanks to the Sponsors

 

That’s the question Erick Schonfeld is asking us today on Techcrunch, and since I’m operating a stealth mode startup and living in Paris - the worst place to settle an internet venture these days - I’ve been asking myself the same question for quite some time.

European Startups today are all over the place, even if (in France) they’re moving away fast, you can find startups just about everywhere.

I remember reading (Michael Arington, maybe) that to create a European Silicon Valley, we (Europeans) should find a place with a high level of money (e.g. VCs), engineers, and sun. Obviously, they’re nothing like that in Europe. Money’s in London, and sun isn’t.

Renting an office in London for a young startup is just foolish: you can live a year in Berlin for a one month rental in a London suburbia. Incorporating in Netherlands is extremely expensive, it’s an administrative nightmare in France, but it can be pretty easy in Spain.

So… Where is the damn thing?

Erick brings a new and interesting idea to all previous writings about this daunting question. It might not be a place, it just could be a state of mind. Twitter, social networks, Skype, mobile phone (and cheap airlines like my personal favorite EasyJet) are changing what made Silicon Valley more than three decades ago, we might not really need a Silicon Valley.

Having an Office in Berlin, your marketing team in Amsterdam and Barcelona and your IT team in Paris is doable (Netvibes is located in Paris, London and San Francisco, after all). We have the tools, we now know how to work this way, organize ourself, keep in touch 24/7…

Erick might just be right, we don’t really need one place, we could do with many: London for VCs, Berlin for cheap offices, Barcelona for the sun (and the south american market)… We already have many places, we just need a state of mind, and we might not be very far from that.

Viva Europa!

Jason Calcanis started an interesting debate about the web’s future and gave his definition of what Web 3.0 could be.

“Web 2.0 services are now the commoditized platform, not the final product. In a world where a social network, wiki, or social bookmarking service can be built for free and in an instant, what’s next?

Web 2.0 services like digg and YouTube evolve into Web 3.0 services with an additional layer of individual excellence and focus.

A version of digg where experts check the validity of claims, corrected errors, and restated headlines to be more accurate would be the Web 3.0 version.

[…]

Also of note, is what Web 3.0 leaves behind. Web 3.0 throttles the “wisdom of the crowds” from turning into the “madness of the mobs” we’ve seen all to often, by balancing it with a respect of experts.”

I must say his vision of the next web is pretty seducing for me, mainly because my upcoming project, Bixmix, is pretty much about this: taking a bottom-up approach to building a semantic web using Web 2.0 tools, and using a dual human-experts/technology approach to do this.

When Tim O’Reilly defined Web 2.0, one of the most understated (and still vastly mis-understood) caracteristic was the ‘Web as a platform’, and today, the platform is here, waiting to be used, just like an OS asking for software. Countless API, RSS, microformats, OpenSocial, low cost semantic publishing platform… every single component to built Calanis’ vision of Web 3.0 is available, most of them being free.

Recently, Dapper and OpenCalais released high end semantic tools to leverage any content and start building a semantic web (still in a bottom-up approach). So what are we waiting for? Actualy, nobody seems to be waiting, and chances are we will see many initiatives to build this Web 3.0 in the months to come.

Another very interesting point in Calanis’ definition is that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ will come to an end and that experts will either leverage this wisdom of crowds or replace the crowd. Of course, Mahalo comes to mind, but many different ways to mix web 2.0 technologies and human expertise will arise and offer fantastic new services tomorow.

Web 1.0 was a warmup, Web 2.0 was abut building a platform, Web 3.0 is about building on Web 2.0… Makes sense, does’nt it?

Olivier Martinez is THE buzz of the moment in France, he is quikly becoming France’s most unpopular celebrity. Just like Chris, everybody hates him, and he really deserves it.

Putting on trial a small Digg-like was a very very bad idea, simply because it was founded by a widly popular blogger, and because many powerfull media printed the same information (but I guess Olivier Martinez hasn’t got the guts to sue them).

Anyway, he’s not bankable anymore here, and I sure hope brands such as Yves Saint Laurent will think twice before using him for their next ad.