Dave Winer has just released a new application: FlickrFan.

FlickrFan downloads high resolution pictures that your friends post to Flickr. If you want, it also downloads high quality pictures from some sources, such as AP wire photos. And you can add more sources. Once the photos are on your Mac's hard disk, you can set up your computer screen saver and display them with cool transitions.

Dave's original idea is to use this application on a Mac Mini connected to a HD TV. I have seen the setup in Dave's living room, and it is very cool. I have been testing the application for a while, even if I don't have a HDTV or a Mac Mini, I just run it on my MacBook Pro and use it to feed my screen saver.

I must say that it's beautiful, it almost makes my computer more interesting when I'm not using it. It's hard to explain why it's such a captivating experience. There's the quality of the pictures: with modern digital cameras quality tends to be pretty good, some of my friends on Flickr are really great photographers and stuff coming from professional photographers on international news network is truly amazing.

And then there's a "Zeitgeist effect". The pictures are not just some random images, it's a curious mix of recent images from my friends and from the news. Mixing an image from Pakistan with what my buddy received for  Christmas makes this sequence of pictures "my world".

Just go and download it, let it run for a while and then enjoy the show. It will make you happy :-).

I took this picture as I woke up this morning. While the tree and the shack's roof are in my neighbor's garden, the hills are in Slovenia. Last night Slovenia officially entered the Schengen Agreement, meaning that, among other things, there are no border controls anymore. In other words: to go on that hill, yesterday I needed a passport, today I don't.

I think that this is a pretty big deal, especially if I remember that just 16 years ago, coming home from work in Trieste one night, I found Italian tanks patrolling this very same border during the 10 day war.

I must say, just like everybody else, that the conference has been almost perfect. I've never attended to any conference so large and yet so perfectly organized. Kudos to Loïc, Géraldine and to the huge staff for the smoothest of all events.

The highlights of the conference, imho, have been Evan Williams telling us to keep things simple, Hans Rosling reminding us (again) that the world is large and very miscellaneous, Joi Ito almost convincing me to check out WOW, Yossi Vardi and his broadband snails and Doc Searls with the concept of "Vendor Relastionship Management".

But most of all I appreciated Philippe Starck. I have been a Stark fan forever, in the sense that I have quite often bought object of visited venues designed by him. I never investigated much about his life, always having the feeling that he must have been an interesting person. Well: he is! Some of the things he said are still resonating in my mind, one for all: "design things for your friends to use".

What I didn't like very much about the conference is that maybe there the program was too intense: for example I would have liked to give to the speakers I listed above some more time, while some of them really had to rush through their presentation. Some panels were a little boring, but that's okay, the one I didn't like at all was the one were a bunch of grumpy old VCs bragged about the presentations of the 30 startups. They could have done much better.

Le Web, as a format, has probably reached the size where it can scale to the sky, it has a TV talk show pace and if it worked for 2,000 it can probably work just as well for 10,000. I kinda miss the smaller and more intimate gatherings, where there can be a conversation also during the event itself, but I guess that it's just a different kind of event.

As usual the best part of the conference has been the networking side. I was very happy to spend some time talking with Dave Winer, Loïc and Géraldine, David Sifry, Robert and Maryam Scoble (and the amazing little Milan), Marc Canter, Marko Ahtisaari, Lisa Sounio, Bert Holland, Doc Searls and most of all David Weinberger, who not only got bumped at the conference but who also starved during a meal in a typical French restaurant, with no vegetarian food on the menu except salad and yogurt. Thank you all for your time and your ideas.

See you next year.

Just back from a very nice dinner with a lot of friends here in Paris. Meeting at least once a year with so many interesting people is just great.

PS: Here some beautiful pictures from David Sifry.

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