Loic Le Meur Blog

Presence check the attendance of your Members of the European Parliament

Shame on the low attendance of certain Members of the European Parliament, check your country, here are three examples;

France
Germany
Italy

and all others are there, too ! Thanks Laurent for the link.

Buongiorno a tutti: "la rapidita della disfunzione della cultura digitale" in Naples

How do you like our conference room at Culture Digitali in Naples ?

Paolo is explaining the blog phenomenon

Franceska and Giuseppe listen carefully

Joi and me learning Italian

Just arrived in Naples, Italy

Naples is very nice, crazy traffic (people going left and right, burning red lights is just normal) and having nice pasta with Giuseppe, Paolo and Joi who just landed too. Tomorrow we talk at Culture Digitali, the first blogging conference in Italy I believe.

The bad news: the hotel does not have any Internet connection, so I am in GPRS, hence lazy with the links... Hope to find a broadband connection at the conference tomorrow.

Ah I forgot, the latest luxury in Naples is to have a house on the Vesuvio itself which has mmm some activity... Probably the last thing I want is a house on a volcano !

See ya later...

Talking about Entrepreneurship at the Forum Barcelona 2004, on July 20th

I will be on a panel on "The role of corporations in the 21st Century" at the Forum Barcelona 2004, a major European event and gathering in Spain. This session will be on July 20th.

Here is the session program:

Corporate practices and management styles have an impact on society, which is why a company’s responsibilities go well beyond its immediate business environment. We therefore need to create a dialogue which focuses on the company’s role as a “citizen”.

This dialogue will debate the issue of how companies, together with public institutions, civil organizations, etc. interact in the network they belong to. It will also examine power relations between governments and large corporations and multinationals.

Thank you, Angel, for inviting me to talk there !
Angel Cabrera was the Dean of the Instituto de Empresa, Angel just moved to the US

10 reasons why should a politician blog

I will be talking with Joi at Culture Digitali in Naples about politics and blogs, so I used as a basis what I wrote on the tentative wiki page on Emergent Democracy in Europe, where many other people helped me.

Here is a modified version for Naples (I mainly added the story of Christophe Grébert, who got nearly arrested in France for his blogging):

Why politicians should have blogs ?

1. To get closer to their audience, their supporters

There are not many ways you can currently talk to a politician leader. You can probably listen to him doing a speech somewhere or on mainstream media, on TV, but interacting with him is difficult. He is usually not accessible, his diary looks terrible, when he walks in a market place he is always surrounded by many people. Difficult to get your message to him and even more difficult to start a discussion with him. When he starts blogging and of course if he leaves his comments open, anybody can post a note on his blog, react to his ideas, start their own discussions.

2. To create a permanent open debate with them

The reason why discussions on blogs are different is that they are public. It is like in a political meeting, if you can finally manage to get your voice heard and the politician is on stage, your question is public. It makes a big difference. If there are many people in the room, he has to answer. Here is another big difference to stay on this policital conference questions analogy. Most of the time, there are so many people in the room that you are lucky to get the right to ask one question, he has to answer, but then it stops there, they move to another question and for sure, you had more things to say, many people in the room had also probably comments to make on the question you raised. You had an opportunity to start a discussion not only with the politician, but with the whole room, but it will not start because mainly of time. On blogs, there are no space or time issues, the discussion can run for ever and remains always public, so it gets more interesting. If the debate gets hot, the leader will have to come back on the comments and say something, otherwise just saying nothing can be seen as not having any answer or comment about it.

André Santini, one of the leaders of the central-right UDF party in France, has been using Emergent Democracy tools for a long time in France, forums, chats a chat example, sms and wikis with his team. Of course, André Santini also has a weblog André Santini's blog but looking at his Internet website and regional campaign website that I are quite institutional, the weblog is hidden in a submenu and André Santini does not post very regularly yet on it, without asking many questions to bloggers and readers. The result is a weblog with few comments for the time being and few discussions starting on it.

3. To test their ideas easily and quickly, to enrich them and get new ones

Blogging an idea for a political leader is a very fast way to get feedback. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former Ministery of Finance in France and one of the key leaders of the French Socialist Party (PS), posted a note on Arnold Schwarzenegger banning gay weddings in California recently and asked the French readers of his blog what they thought about it. DSK as we call him got more than one hundred comments on his blog bost from people in favor of gay weddings and people against it. They suggested him to read good press articles about it, expressed their views, started a discussion. By reading this for sure DSK's own ideas about it got richer, the feedback was immediate without any logistics involved. Of course one may argue that only the people using the Internet can react. That is right, but fortunately the penetration is getting higher and higher, we have more than twenty people on-line in France and France is one of the least Internet connected country in Europe (-Internet penetration in Nordic countries, anybody ?)

Nobody can pretend that they know everything one hundred people know about a subject, to get back to DSK's note example. The ideas get richer through permanent conversations and written comments even if these are against the original thoughts.

4. To switch the way they talk to people usually from institutional to more personal

Jean-François Copé who is the current French Government's spokesperson and right wing (UMP) candidate to the regional elections, started his blog by posting press releases. I could convince him to open the comments field and leave it open. He got flamed in the beginning quite strongly by bloggers and blog readers telling him he should not communicate this way. People do not want press releases on blogs. They want the politician's voice, exactly as if they were meeting him in person. They want his ideas, his feelings, his humour, his "Etats d'âme". It took some time, but Jean-François Copé and his team got it more and more, they started posting personal feelings, personal comments, and stopped posting institutional communication. This is very new. This is not about a political speech that has been reviewed by ten people, it is about what Jean-François Copé can actually write himself, directly, to the people who want to read him and start talking to him. You have to blog like you talk, otherwise it looks fake and bloggers notice it immediately. The worse thing that happened was that just one day before the regional elections Jean-François Copé abandoned his blog, the last note is a cemetery of the blog, with more than 160 comments from visitors making fun of him. This is of course terrible as his blog is still number one in Google for his name...

5. To better understand the criticism of the people against their ideas

Jean-François Copé's blog is the blog that got the highest number of opponents commenting. My take is that he is both a candidate at the Regional elections and the Government spokesperson which does not help him much. He has been very courageous to leave the comments of the sharper criticisms online. I cannot quote any other experiment that is close to this. Wait a second, Jean-François Copé is a well known political leader and he helps his opponents by leaving their notes on his own blog ! This is courageous, but it would actually be better if he would answer them more, I guess this is a question of investing more time into the weblog and it will come. This is all very new in France. Reading the opponents' voice is actually very interesting, to understand them and better reply.

6. To spread their ideas easily if they are supported by many people, in a decentralized way

André Santini has a section on his campaign site called "Your Weblogs" and André Santini points to blogging solutions to encourage his readers to start their own. This is of course a good way of having supporters blog appearing and talking about his campaign, linking to his blog notes. Unfortunately, listing the friends blogs in a list we call blogrolling is not yet used very much and there are very few people in France for the time being that dare to expose in public their ideas to support a candidate. It will change. We will probably see hundreds of supporters weblogs like Howard Dean had for his campaign, but we are not quite there yet. The politician leaders blogs will link into them and get a lot of audience from them.

7. To raise funds for their cause, party or campaign

I do not know of any experience in Europe of successful political funds raising on the Internet. André Santini has a page where he asks for donations but there is no online payment, it has to be done by paper cheque which is far from being online donations of course, mainly due to French law. This will change in the future.

Unfortunately, I do not know any major political funds raising that happened in Europe, very different to what happened with Howard Dean in the US.

8. To reach a younger audience and help young people get more interested in politics

The Internet is the medium of the young, not only of course, but it is mostly used in Europe by less than 35 years old people. The trend in politics is that less and less young people are actually interested by politics just looking at the higher abstention rate. Giving them an opportunity to start discussions and participate rather than listen to a speech or a TV show gets them more interested into politics. I believe the future candidates who will get it will gather many new votes from them.

9. To create around them network effects

Blogs spread the word bottom-up, not top-down like traditional media. Information spreads fast only if it is interesting, otherwise it stays dead. Information spreads by bloggers linking into it (and standard Internet sites of course) and sending their audience where it originated. The tools that measure these network effects are new kind of search engines that measure the number of links either to a page or to a site. I have been watching on a permanent manner what Technorati, one of these search engines, calls the cosmos of the French politicians blogs. Anybody can measure very fast how authoritative a politician is through his blog and how fast his ideas spread.

Another way of measuring network effects of a politician of course is his rankings in Google on some search words (his name, his ideas, his political party, etc). I am not going to give a ranking here but what is interesting is that in a search on these politicians names, the blogs of their most authoritative supporters or opponents appear very often on the first page, sometimes before their own site or blog.

10. To become famous if you are an unkown politician, or to start a political action, even locally

Christophe Grébert blogs on monputeaux.com. He is a citizen of the city Puteaux, close to Paris.

Christophe does not like the way the city mayor manages the city, spends the public money and says it on his blog, every day. He has been very successful doing that, with hundreds of inhabitants of Puteaux reading and commenting his blog everyday and many national newspapers that talked about his blog.

Christophe criticizes the city management so much that they have tried to stop him for months, the city mayor has even sent him threats over the phone that he recorded and blogged, of course.

He has recently been stopped in the street by the Police Municipale (the local French Police) who tried to arrest him for his blogging. Fortunately for Christophe, the National Police arrived immediately as they found what was happening weird, and let him go.

Christophe was also finally sued by the City Mayor for his blogging, we do not know the outcome yet but I see no reason why he would lose this battle, he just expresses his views. His blogs gets more and more popular and I would not be surprised if Christophe would start getting more involved in local politics thanks to the audience and support his blog provided him with.

I am sure we will continue to see unknown people appear from nowhere, starting playing a significant role in local and one day national politics, as blogs get more and more popular. Blogs give a voice to people, to anybody, and the best news is that the Young people get more and more interested in Politics with them.

1.3 million text messages sent to the French Prime Minister last tuesday

So, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, when will you start your blog ?!

via [Howard Rheingold]:

On Tuesday June 1st, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin answered questions online on several Web sites (at premier-ministre.gouv.fr, TF1, Wanadoo, www.e-1789.com and by SMS, via mobile community Freever's website.

The tally is in, 1.3 million text message questions were sent to the Prime minister, reports Le Parisien, beating previous 2002 record held by Jean-Marie Lepen with 250'000 SMS questions. cf previous post.

VNU rolls-out its IT publications blogs on Typepad

Who said the journalists do not get the blogs phenomenon ?

After the #1 French Computer Monthly publication SVM blog, now VNU just launched in the U.K. the blog IT Sneak, of IT Week, all on Typepad and more European Countries to start soon !

Dominique Busso, head of VNU Net in Europe, says: "This is our second weblog under typepad, and I am sure it is only the start of a long series of weblogs in Europe across our 7 territories and over 50 publications. This tool is very easy to set up and the collaborative option is just great (you invite Senior and Junior journalist in a minute, great workflow tool...) and there you go with your editorial team. We are testing new editorial concept on the fly, we have also launched a broadband blog for customers feedback, this tool is just magic for us publisher, and it is the only way to take the blog wave, move fast, and use simple but reliable tools."

Thanks for your trust, Dominique.

Playing video games

Thanks Doc for the link to the videogame that I used to play while my parents where having dinner I played it again today . I should say the one I spent the most time on was FFX, tens of hours with my kids last year, like Myy, I should test FFX-2, when I don't work or blog...

I want the same home

Great design for a web kiosk in the Helsinki airport, I want one in my living room ! The computer screen moves by touching a button and there are high-end speakers inside, cool... Thanks JY for the picture !

A great use of blogs in School

Ewan McIntosh launched on Typepad the Musselburgh Grammar School's weblog. Ewan is a French teacher, and launches also a blog for each school trip, here is one in Normany and Paris

A great use of weblogs at School, that apparently drives excellent results, congrats, Ewan !

Is Entrepreneurship important for the EU policy ?

Philippe talks about the speech of the European commissioner Erkki Liikanen, and says things move in the right direction. I don't buy it. I heard a speech of Erkki Liikanen on European Entrepreneurship in Davos two years ago and I saw nothing happening after. I guess in this fiels the EU is excellent for speeches.

Here is what Philippe says about it:

European commissioner Erkki Liikanen, responsible for Europe Enterprise, made a speech on the subject of "Entrepreneurship: an integral and vital part of the EU policy mix" at an extraordinary meeting with the Employer’s Group of the European Economic and Social Committee.

Abstracts of Liikanen’s speech :

As you know, entrepreneurship and small businesses are – particularly for the European economy – a key source of jobs, business dynamism and innovation. Some 25 million SMEs in Europe provide more than two-thirds of total jobs in the private sector. This means SMEs employ more than 100 million people. Our most dynamic SMEs account for around 80% of new jobs created. <
However, there are still too many barriers stand in the way of entrepreneurs. With our new Entrepreneurship Action Plan, we therefore intend to target practical issues such as:
- How do we encourage entrepreneurial initiative and are we doing enough to ensure small firms can grow?
- How do we handle the handover of family businesses from one generation to another?
- How do we make sure that if a business fails people are given a second chance?
- This initiative, together with our initiatives in the areas of industrial policy, innovation and competitiveness – together with our ambitious work to achieve better regulation – all have a positive contribution to make as key elements to ensure growth in Europe.

Improving the world, Improving the situation in Irak

Wonderful initiative supported by Jeff, Dan, Britt and others. Here is what Jeff is saying about it:

Wage Peace! ... From Americans to Iraqis
: If you want to improve the world -- and, of course, you do -- here is a wonderful way:

Spirit of America is collecting contributions from Americans to buy Iraqi citizens the things they need to help rebuild their country and their future: tools, broadcasting equipment, sewing machines, business loans, blog hosting...

I think of this as the Statue of Liberty in reverse: We, the people put together our money and effort to help build democracy on the other side of the world. We could buy them a new statue in Firdaus Square. Or we could buy them something useful.

I've signed on to help the good people behind this movement. And I'll warn you, my blogging friends: I'll be putting the arm on each one of you to help -- to give money, to put up a banner, to put up a link, to volunteer, anything to help. This should be our cause.

First, go read Dan Gillmor's wonderful column about Spirit of America.

Marc Danziger, a.k.a. the "Armed Liberal" Web logger, supported the war in Iraq. Britt Blaser, a Howard Dean campaign adviser, did not.

Yet they agree on at least one thing about that Middle Eastern nation's struggle: However right or wrong America's official policy may be, Americans should do what we can to help Iraqis.

In that spirit, they're assisting a Web-based humanitarian project that almost anyone can endorse, regardless of one's stance on the wisdom of the war. It's called "Spirit of America" -- and it's a bright spot in an otherwise horrendous muddle.

In the next few weeks, the organization hopes to sign up a million Americans as contributors, volunteers or simply people who are interested enough to pay attention.

This is important work on so many levels: As Dan says, no matter what you think about the war, we have a human obligation to help the Iraqi people. But it is also enlightened self-interest: If we can help the Iraqis build their nation and their democracy and if we can connect with them on a personal level -- if, to be blunt, we can demonstrate that Americans are not ugly -- then we create a foothold for democracy, freedom, modernity, civilization, and just friendship in the Middle East.

I came to this effort through this weblog. Many of you know the story already, but I'll recount it briefly for those who don't: By chance, I discovered the amazing story of Iranian weblogs, launched by an expat Johnny Appleseed of blogging and democracy, Hoder. As the war in Iraq wound to a close -- or so we thought -- I said that we needed to see the sort of citizens' media and free speech growing in Iran -- even Iran -- in Iraq. I wished for "a thousand Salam Paxes." I fretted that we'd need government, charity, military, and business help. But one day last fall, a 24-year-old Baghdad dentist named Zeyad emailed me and said, 'OK, you've convinced me, now help me.' He started blogging. Then, with a camera from America, he covered events Western media did not and even the White House paid attention. It was such a simple, small, human connection. I wanted to do more but didn't know how.

Blogger Kerry Dupont did a hundred times more. She sent bloggers in Iraq laptops and cameras. Yet she wanted to do still more. So she has now signed up with Spirit of America as the chief of procurement (the Radar O'Reilley, as I say).

Marc Danziger wanted to do more. As the Armed Liberal blogger at Winds of Change (now revealing his identity), he has signed on as COO.

Blogger Britt Blaser wanted to do more; he helped Howard Dean's campaign and lately has been working on taking the lessons and tools of that campaign and bringing them to campaigns anywhere. He has signed on to help Spirit of America.

Jim Hake started SoA and he wanted to do more. He raised $1.5 million so far and now wants to raise millions more and sign up countless Americans to reach out to Iraqis. He also reached out to buyout genius Ted Forstmann, who's going to help raise the big bucks.

And I'm reaching out to you.

Spirit of America is going to let us all do more. It carries on the work and spirit of Chief Wiggles and Operation Give and countless individual soldiers who have had their families back home send baseballs and frisbees over to give to kids -- but in a big way. They will raise millions of dollars to respond to requests from the streets of Iraq for material such as tools, help with media (both TV and weblogs!), help start microbusinesses owned by Iraqis, and help bring sports back to the Iraqi youth. Eventually, SoA hopes to be a conduit for needs in Iraq and contributions from America.

Think of it as open-source nation-building.

Spirit of America is already helping. Last week, Kerry put together the shipment of 15 pallets of tools to send to Iraqi craftsmen trained by Marines and SeaBees as carpenters, electricians, and plumbers.

I have been wanting to bring more citizens' media to Iraq -- blogging tools translated into Arabic and free blog hosting, for example. I now hope we can accomplish this via SoA.

So I will be working with these good folks on citizens' media in Iraq. I'm advising them on media until they get a pro onboard. And I'm appealing to you to help. This is just the start.

If we do this right, we can show the people of Iraq and the Middle East that the people of America -- politics be damned -- are allies to them and to freedom and democracy.

: I sent shameless link-begging (for charity) email to many bloggers and realized it was pretty dumb of me to do that and then not put up this post until Tuesday. So I've just imagined that I'm in London, where it's Tuesday, and here's "tomorrow's" post.

: See also Britt Blaser's post here.

Joi the Japanese Internet star ?

Joi in the USA today and the same article in about 50 other sources.

Great PR, Joi !

Just imagine if a blogger did like this journalist, posting the same story to 50 different weblogs, I guess he would be flamed for polluting the blogosphere, right ?

NB. Joi can you tell the journalist he forgot the link to Six Apart :=)

An amazing trend in Denmark could make it become the center of Europe

Denmark is small, but some interesting facts could make it become an immigration place in Europe, even some Americans are thinking about moving there (see comments).

Adam really does not look

bored

Bush beats Kerry by far in Blogpulse

I have just played with Blogpulse, interesting toy that helps you compare trends for any search word.

Here is Bush versus Kerry:

Social text in Business Week

Socialtext highlighted by Business Week as something that could transform Corporate America.

Congrats, Ross.

Disclosure: I invested in Socialtext

Very interesting report from Napsterization.org

Very interesting report from Napsterization.org (Mary) on Henry's survey.

Blogads/Henry Copeland conducted a survey, where 17k people responded. Results are here.

Interesting things: respondents were women at 20%, men at 79%. Henry emailed that the women on average were 10 years older than the men.

Educators were the highest responding industry, at 14%, though computer professionals were the largest job category at 11%. 43% consider themselves opinion makers, 40% democrat, 91% from the US, and self-identified spending online was highest at $0 for every category (from travel to music to consumer electronics) except books, which had 23% of the respondents saying they spend $100-199 per year online. Amazon must be thrilled.

But the most interesting stuff for me is that 54% get their news primarily from the internet, and 55% find blogs "extremely useful," reading an average of 5 blogs per day. Also, they spend 10 hours per week on blog reading. Why? They reported that they do it for news they can't find elsewhere (79%) and for a different perspective (77%).

Wow. That backs up the surveys I did earlier this spring, where people self reported 45 minutes per day on average of online news reading, and said they read blogs primarily for the two reasons in the last paragraph. That demographics was a Craig's readership, with broadband at home. While the data from the Blogads survey is a sample of people who visit Henry Copeland's site, or were directed there by other bloggers, the information he has collected is extremely interesting of this subset of the populace.

Robert says Bloggers have (almost) the same tools as Professional journalists

Robert, I agree, bloggers have (almost) equal weapons with professional journalists. For the helicopter, ask one to Microsoft :=)

Posting directly from iphoto into Typepad

Really cool (I mean REALLY cool having seen the time it saves me). Post directly from iphoto to your Typepad account.

Via Where We're Bound