"Sorry, we cannot come to the office today, we're snowed in". I've been waiting to be able to make this call for two years, since we moved to the hills. Waking up this morning this is what we see from our window:



The weather alerts on the radio are clear: main roads are closed, stay at home if you can.

If we weren't on holiday it would be perfect :-)

There's a bunch of UI improvements on Technorati today. No huge changes but it does look better and it feels cleaner than before.

Running a vanity search I found this picture by Heiko with me at Les Blogs trying to explain to David Sifry how Technorati should work. Judging from his face I did not convince him ;-)

Technorati Tags: DavidSifry, Technorati

Gmail mobile is great news. I have been traveling a lot recently and I'm using my mobile phone more and more for non-voice stuff. Bloglines is definitely my primary mobile app, not only to be updated about friends and news but also because a lot of our internal stuff is available via RSS. Google local for mobile is also cool. Not very useful here because maps are not available, but showing satellite imagery on your cellphone is a great way to impress friends :-) [via Lifeblog]

Technorati Tags: Google, mobile

This italian blogger will take her clothes off if she gets enough links and comments.

PS: it looks like it's a fake.

Technorati Tags: Girls, web2.0

Paul Kedrosky and Stowe Boyd argue that structured blogging will fail because people are lazy and they want their own way of saying things. They are right: the vast majority of bloggers will not use structured blogging, just like the majority of bloggers don't use tags, the majority of Wikipedia readers don't edit its articles and the majority of people who buy stuff on Amazon don't write reviews. I think that solutions adopted by niches can provide value even if they don't go mainstream, a very little number of users with passion can let us afford a very large number of "free riders".

Technorati Tags: PaulKedrosky, structured blogging, StoweBoyd

I don't usually steal stuff in hotels. I might have brought home some soap bars but that's about it. This is why I hate when they use these "hookless" hangers in hotels, I guess that the whole point is that you can't take them home, right? Don't they trust their customers? And even if I did bring home an hanger: would it be a major loss, bigger than, say, an ashtray? (Ashtrays are not bolted on tables, I checked).

And anyway, all you need to have is a screwdriver, a motivated customer might still manage to go away with some hangers. And I do have a screwdriver with me. Hmm...

Technorati Tags: hangers

I'm in an hotel in Milano, connected to a quite expensive Wi-Fi network: 27 euros for 24 hours with Swisscom. I have just fired up Bit Torrent and started downloading a bunch of files. I'm going to squeeze every single byte from this connection. :-)

Except during the conference, I spent most of the last week offline. Well, almost. I could get on-line at pretty good speed with my 3G phone, but the cost of IP roaming is just crazy (0,75 eurocent/kb = 7,6 Euros per Mb).

This meant that quite a few times I opened my aggregator and found myself picking single feeds instead of getting my usual "river of news" style page. There are sources and friends I'm willing to pay to read but honestly they are a minority.

I'll create a few sub-groups in my aggregator to be able to easily read only my favorite feeds, no matter how much it's going to cost. All others will have to wait until I get on a broadband connection. It's an interesting exercise.

Technorati Tags: 3G, aggregators

After one week in Paris our home seems incredibly calm, silent and relaxing :-)

Les Blog has been as good as I expected. It might seem a bit naive, but I still find exciting meeting so many incredibly smart people at these conferences. As David Weinberger wrote recently, we are the strange ones living on the internet house boats while the rest of the world thinks we are crazy, and they are right. Spending two days in a room packed with crazy people makes you feel normal.

I won't write again about how cool and weird is shaking for the first time hands of bloggers you have been talking with for years: it was great to meet for the first time Robert Scoble, David Sifry and Peter Kaminsky. Just like it was good meeting again Thomas Burg, Hugh MacLeod and Ben Hammersley. Or meeting new interesting friends like Anina and Jian Ni.

Thanks to Loïc and all the Les Blogs staff for the great experience.

Technorati Tags: lesblogs

Blogging might not be mainstream in most European countries, but it does leave visible traces on the web and, most important, on google. This is why sponsoring blogging conferences is a good opportunity for companies to get some visibility on the web.

If you are a big company and decide to sponsor meals or a party, please, make sure that bloggers are going to enjoy the food that you are offering and that they can get enough of you and that the party doesn't run out of beer at 9:30 pm. It's going to be good for your image.

Technorati Tags: lesblogs

Yesterday's night party was loud and crowded, and they ran out of beer at 10pm (!). The good news is that we didn't go to sleep too late :-)

Today Mena Trott's keynote about civility and blogging created some tension in the room.

The current panel on RSS is saying that we will not be hearing about RSS anymore next year, just like we don't hear about SMTP. At some time it will happen, but I think I already heard this last year. Microformats and agrgegators. Hmmm... now it's getting interesting.

Technorati Tags: lesblogs

David Sifry, who I met for the first time about one hour ago even if it didn't feel the first time, just showed me Technorati Mini. Quite cool, especially during conferences when updates are very frequent.

Technorati Tags: davidsifry, lesblogs, technorati

Wifi is working, Robert Scoble and Shel Isral are keynoting, lots of friends, old and new in the room. JY is missing somebody. :-)

Technorati Tags: lesblogs

Tomorrow we'll fly to France, attend to Les Blogs 2.0 on Monday and Tuesday and enjoy the rest of the week in Paris. Ping me if you will be at the conference.

Technorati Tags: LesBlogs20

Interesting post by Stowe Boyd about RSS readers and why they are not good enough for him.

Stowe's approach to RSS reading and web surfing is definitely extreme by today's standards but it's undoubtedly a path more and more users will be taking in the future. His list of requests mostly include simple tools to take advantage of widely adopted technologies such as tags, IM, or blogging.

I don't know how many users in the world wild web would actually be using an approach similar to Stowe's to dig information today, but I think his list of features could be an interesting foundation to improve tools for intranet-level applications.

Technorati Tags: RSS Readers, RSS, StoweBoyd