Luca De Biase is not happy about having to travel to the US tomorrow.

Akma: At the moment, after the blush of excitement about the tag-powered, folksonomical Web has faded, that looks like an unacceptable brake on this new step. Brent, Adriaan, Firefoxians, SixApart, tool developers: please help us out on this, or tip us off that the overhead isn't worth it.

Of course I couldn't agree more. It's all about making things simple. Not only because ordindary people doesn't like to spend time writing code (or even cutting and pasting), even pros prefer single click features.

I'm playing with Yahoo! 360°. I haven't been able to map my blog with a simple URL yet (it's not that I didn't find the place to set it, it simply doesn't work).

So far I'm unimpressed. I do understand that it has to be simple but this looks both complicated (I keep moving from page to page to find stuff) and limited (apparently I cannot do much).

But, of course, this is only the first impression :-)

Saturday was my third blog birthday.

I always find amazing to look back at what we were doing back in spring 2002. I was involved in much more conversations than I am today, there was a lot of enthusiasm about stuff like OPML, instantOutliners, RSS, espresso cups, blogging, intranets, Radio tools...

It's hard to explain, It's not that I'm not enjoing blogging today but I have this feeling about everything being more serious and "grown up", a little less enthusiasm, a little more business and a lot of added diplomacy.

Maybe it was more fun when we were kids... 3 years ago ;-)

DataBlogging is "the notion that traditional blog entries have extended data fields appended to them to track various things." [Scripting News]

This is the kind of thing that traditional software engineers love: lots of little fields to collect lots of different kind of data, each one in its little box.

It's not that I don't get the merit in this idea: collecting specific data allows to create much more value when you have to automatically digest it. But I think that the great thing about weblogs is that they are simple to use. Even when we designed a way to add relatively simple metadata such as topics to weblog posts, we tried to keep it simple and to do everything we could to help the user to fill-up the form.

Look at this datablogging screenshot. It's definetly a dream for every engineer... but isn't it a nightmare for every user?

Anyway, it's an interesting approach, it would be fun to play with their feeds, our topics and our aggregator.

JD Lasica and Marc Canter are announcing the alpha version of OurMedia.org.

OurMedia.org mission is simple yet bold and ambitious:

Ourmedia is a global community and learning center where you can gain visibility for your works of personal media. We'll host your media forever [~] for free.

Congratulations and good luck.

Congratulations to the Flickr team and to Yahoo!

Now you can reach me at my brand new SkypeIn number: +1 (240) 949-2775

Cool.

Notice for Mac users: the Skype site says "SkypeIn does not work with Skype for Mac or Skype for Linux yet, but we're working on it." but installing the latest beta version 1.0.0.15 I was able to use both SkypeIn and Voice Mail.

Dave likes Flickr, I love it too: it's now at the top of this page. While expert bloggers are using all kind of services from many different vendors, Yahoo! 360 could soon offer the global service for... "the rest of us".

Apparently the big company is getting ready with a bunch of new blogging and social software services, probably adding to the blogging platform all in all their current services (photos, reviews, groups, RSS aggregator) spiced up with some social networking features.

Stowe Boyd reported recently about Peter Kaminsky saying that the kind of social software that works is the one that allows people to build things together. This is why Flickr works so well.

Putting together their existing applications, the huge number of users that they already have and social networking could lead to some interesting places...

Stowe Boyd: I agree with Liz - in the blogosphere, Google Juice is about people 'voting' on your relevance to the issues you have decided to wrestle with, and represents the degree to which you'd be missed if you stopped blogging. As an end in itself, it is a 21st century parlor trick, but as an indicator of the karma that bloggers have built up, by crafting posts that make people think, link, and comment, Google Juice means something important.

Even if I haven't been writing much on this English side of this weblog for a while, spending much more time on my Italian blogging, I'm still the first Paolo on google.com (and the only Valdemarin on the whole first results page). If google ranking really is a karma indicator I guess that I should devote more time to this site.

It looks like in April I'll be in Paris with a lot of interesting people.

Thanks to Loïc for inviting me :-)

Mark Frauenfelder @ Boing Boing Blog

U.N. landmine commerical won't air in US.

A U.N. commercial depicts American girls playing in a soccer match. A girl steps on a landmine and there's a big explosion. Kids get blown apart. CNN and other networks don't want to air the ad.

The explosion appears to kill and injure some girls, sparking panic and chaos among parents and other children. Shrieks of horror are heard through much of the spot, and a father is shown cradling his daughter's lifeless body, moments after celebrating a goal she had scored.

It closes with a tag line reading: "If there were landmines here, would you stand for them anywhere? Help the U.N. eradicate landmines everywhere."

You can view the ad here. (Here's a torrent file). Link and another Link

Joi Ito: You can say landmine all you want, but a video has impact beyond words. I really think that video blogging will evolve into an important part of our dialog. I wish more news agencies would provide us with material to use to create citizen video commentary. Maybe CNN can ban it, but we can still distribute it on the Internet.

I've been playing with my new Nokia for a couple of days now. There's no way to syncronize it with my address book since the phone is currently not supported by iSync and I'm also running a beta version of MacOS with some Bluetooth problems; anyway I was able to import all my contacts from my old Nokia phone thanks to a nice little app included with the new phone.

What's cool with this phone is that it's a 3G phone, meaning that I can get a decent data connection almost anywhere, and it works just fine with my PowerBook. It's near wi-fi everywhere. At Eur. 0,75 per Megabyte is not cheap, but it's cool.

Oh, and I can also do nice little videos. :-)