Enterprise 2.0 Guru Andrew McAfee lately came out with the quote of the week, from Kierkegaard :

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

Give it a thought. And a speech.

Good Idea indeed

There are a couple of apps around offering services for you to measure how 2.0 / geek / marketable you and your blog are. Back to Sociometry again !

Thanks to badideaindeed for somehow starting up this Rate Me meme : Philippe gives this WebSideGrader link that allow you to grade how efficient your site is from a marketing perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer day

On 21st June in France there is this 20 something year old habit of celebrating the music : this is la Fête de la Musique. Basically anyone can go out and play dance and sings. You ain’t gonna have any trouble because you’re making music or noise up until very late. Very funky. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to slashdot, I’ve found this great article on how univeristy librarian (the Digital Immigrants) should change the way they interact with students (the Digital Natives) to help them finding their ways through the temple of knowledge a library is.

James Paul Gee, a linguist who is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul, argued that librarians need to adapt their techniques to digital natives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kill your television

Il y a déjà cet extrait de l’ouvrage de Al Gore qui, chiffre à l’appui, prouve combien la télévision en anesthésiant l’esprit critique est une plaie de la démocratie.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.(…)

In practice, what television’s dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters.(…) Read the rest of this entry »

Technologies and class representation

Fantastic blog essay by the always fascinating danah boyd : Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. This post about teenagers cultural classes in United States and their choice in chosing social networking tools. Some samples :

“In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around “class” is extremely difficult in the United States. (…). She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income.” Read the rest of this entry »

J’en ai déjà parlé ici. Un entretien impressionnant avec le philosophe Alexander Bard ici.

On le retrouve dans le chronicart de ce mois-ci. Un petit extrait :

Personnellement, j’ai dépassé l’ancienne division gauche-droite. Elle ne fait plus de bien à personne. La gauche restera une vieille gauche de toute façons, tant qu’elle ne se sera pas débarrassé de ses utopismes proto-chrétiens. La seule radicalité à exister réellement est le pragmatisme radical. Il n’existe rien de plus radical que refuser de fuir devant le réel et se confronter au monde tel qu’il est, et non tel qu’on aimerait qu’il soit.

Nicolas Gogol et le PS

Je ne pense absolument rien de François Fillon. Il s’agit d’un homme politique, sénateur de surcroît, petit soldat de Sarkozy (qui devrait y aller mollo avec la Vodka), député de la Sarthe : rien vraiment pour le rendre sympathique. Je reste pantois cependant devant sa formule splendide pour qualifier le PS : les “Grandes âmes sêches”. Cela a un côté romanesque très XiXème, evoque le tragi-comique du chef d’oeuvre de Nicolas Gogol. Et sied tellement bien au PS d’aujourd’hui.

(M’est avis que c’est cette dimension littéraire et érudite plus encore que la justesse qui a blessé le parti et l’a amené a exigé des excuses. Quand on se rappelle comment ils ont diabolisé Sarkozy durant la campagne, on se dit qu’ils n’ont décidément aucune dignité.) Read the rest of this entry »

MyBlogLog

You probably have noticed this blue box with avatars in it appearing on your favorite blogs for the last few months. At first you don’t notice this kind of widgets. Then you look a little bit what it’s all about. And then you join the community, which I did eventually.

This blog is not to describe what this service is : people did it months ago (an eternity) in a much better way than I could now. Rather, this post attempts to describe why this is an extremely clever Web 2.0 application. Read the rest of this entry »

Les récents drames dans l’industrie automobile française (plusieurs suicides de cadres en quelques semaines) mettent à nouveau à jour la pression sous laquelle travaillent nos concitoyens. Si effectivement la situation est grave, je ne partage pas l’alarmisme délirant de ce Rebond dans libé (notez la grande sagesse des 2 premiers commentaires - quel discernement !).

Le remarquable ouvrage de Thomas Philippon que j’ai déjà évoqué ici avance de brillantes théories sur notre grande difficulté à travailler ensemble, que ce soit dans le privé ou le public d’ailleurs. Entre parenthèses, il s’agit d’un des grands regrets de Mitterand que de ne pas avoir pu/su fluidifier et harmoniser ces relations. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to be a Professional working in airline distribution system business. Man, life was great : I was making good money in the countries I wanted (I even managed to reject an offer from Qantas, stupid me) being international consultant in this niche market with old techs. Then came September 11.

Within half a day my professional skills were made obsolete (okay there were worth things around, but still : it was still bad). I then decided then to switch to new techs in general and Java Programming language in particular. I started this self-training to prepare for the Java programmer certification.

This is when Kathy Sierra came into my professional life (messiah image dressed in white surrounded with a halo of dazzling light). Read the rest of this entry »

Lorsque l’on vit à l’étranger on entretient une relation particulière, bien plus intime avec sa nationalité. On se retrouve confronté à un autre mode de vie qui fait réfléchir à notre idenditéet la part de conditionnement culturel qui la compose.

Accessoirement, on se retrouve dans la peau d’un micro-ambassadeur et on représente sa patrie : et ça, c’est un grand honneur. Read the rest of this entry »

(click to play the soundtrack of this post)

Digital Attraction

I quite fancy David Armano’s blog. This is full of ideas and nice visual assets about design, user experience and web 2.0.It was strange to see this touching post though. I probably am wrong but this sounds to me like self-persuasion : “hey real life is cool : I can see, I can feel, I can touch, I can smell, I can communicate“. But, then, there is digital attraction he cant resist : “OK, I think I’m ready for work now. :)” is the way this blog post ends, rather sadly. Read the rest of this entry »

Miranda July - No one belongs here more than you

I just love that :

Common + Technical

In the early 90s when I started my carreer as an IT professionnal, there was in France this very popular stand-up comedy trio called Les Inconnus (the Unknown - wish they actually were). They had this rather stupid story about software engineers (in-gé-nieur in-for-ma-ti-cieeeeen) which had the whole country laughing. People was laughing with this story because :

• IT job is very common and technical, both adjectives being abuse in France
• the IT professional character was depicted as an autistic guy looking clumsy and uncomfortable about everywhere but in front of a PC : uncool as hell. Read the rest of this entry »