Loic Le Meur Blog

Let's go to space together

I thought private flights to space would not be possible during my lifetime but this is great news. The plane is $20M that could be a bit expensive to own one (!) but the trips should be priced around $100K which looks more accessible...

I like this quote of Michael Melvill, the 63 years old pilot who just came back: "Looking at the Earth from up there is almost a religious experience"

Here is what Dan says about it:

A New Frontier for Humanity

It's impossible to overstate the importance of this morning's privately funded space flight by Mike Melvill, who piloted SpaceShipOne into a suborbital flight 100 kilometers high. Neil Armstrong took a giant step in 1969, but this was just as important.

I have huge respect for NASA, the U.S. space agency. But NASA needs the help of private explorers and industry, and of people like Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founded who funded this mission. We need NASA for the giant endeavors, but we need privately funded space flight for everything else.

The first primary use of these ships will, no doubt, be tourism. A few years ago I reconciled myself to not living long enough to go into space. Now I think I have a shot at seeing my home from a distance that shows the curvature of the Earth.

Tourism is only the beginning, of course. Humanity must get off this planet, in part because we are an exploring, expansionist species but also in part because the survival of the species may depend on it. This is a great step toward the new frontier.

Congratulations to all.

Note: There's great coverage of this entire mission, and more, at Space.com

The average blogger may not be that 13 years old girl

"Exactly 61% of the blog readers that responded to the survey are over the age of 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year. In fact, nearly 30% of the respondents are between the ages of 31 and 40, and over 37% spanned the ages of 41 to 60. And nearly 40% have a household income of $90,000 or higher."

Read more in this eMarketer article about who are the Bloggers. Congrats Henry for the survey.

Pocketster, the portable social software server on your Pocket PC

This is exactly what the phones will become very shortly, they will have a public server that allow others to learn more about you, share your ideas with them, will do personal advertising and matchmaking.

Howard reviews the use of Pocketster, which does this on Pocket PC. Unfortunately having it available on a Pocket PC will result in Geek matchmaking only, the real social change will happen when it hits the phones.

For those of you who want to do Geek matchmaking now, Pocketster is available today for download.

The End of 20th Century Journalism

Thank you for your note about Ohmynews, Howard, thanks for pointing me to read more about OhmyNews founder and CEO Yeon Ho.

Yeon has adressed the 2004 World Association of Newspapers Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, with a very interesting case study of Ohmynews, here are some quotes:

"The traditional newspaper inherently has two limits: time and space. That's why only professional journalists can write articles for the papers.

But Internet media can overcome these two barriers. In some ways, the Internet also has time and space limits, but in others the Internet has no time and space limits. That's why a citizen reporter can participate in the news reporting.

By means of the Internet, OhmyNews created a two-way journalism. The readers are no longer passive. They can be reporters anytime they want."

"We started OhmyNews with 727 citizen reporters, now we have about 33,000. "

"In March, there was a huge candlelight demonstration in the center of Seoul. Two hundred thousand people were gathered and demanded that President Roh not be impeached.

Twenty staff reporters and several citizen reporters were all there to cover the demonstration vividly with the combination text-photo-video and we published a special edition of the weekly paper.

We broadcast the event live on OhmyTV and updated text articles every 30 minutes during the six-hour demonstration.

About four hundred thousand OhmyNews readers participated in the demonstration online, and over 85,000 comments on the one issue were recorded on our site.

With this kind of coverage, OhmyNews is challenging and changing the traditional media formula of how to write, how to edit. "

"Yes, in the media market there has been a media power which says "this is standard, follow me". The standards of 20th century journalism have been created and controlled by professional newspaper journalists.

But these standards are challenged by the Internet: challenged by new journalists of the new space, they are called netizens or citizen reporters.

They challenged the traditional media logic of who is a reporter, what is news, what is the best news style, and what is newsworthy.

Because the old standards were challenged, the media power of traditional newspapers has declined. In Korea, we have seen a power shift in the media market, which was originally dominated by conservative newspapers."

Amazing. I stored this note in "Journalism and Blogging" even though Ohmynews is not a blog but I guess this is OK as people writing blogs are also "Citizens Reporters".

Off to San Francisco and speaking at Supernova

I am leaving for San Francisco tomorrow and I will be at Supernova next week.

The conference schedule is excellent and I am delighted to talk at the closing session with Dan Gillmor and Elizabeth Lane Lawley about "Closing the Back-Channel Loop".

I had written a note on the amazing E-tech back Channel and I will enjoy getting deep into Supernova's back Channel.

I don't see any back channel tool missing:

-the Supernova weblog
-the Supernova wiki
-a web conferencing tool, Convoq
-an IRC chat channel
-an audio feed
-and of course the "Hecklebot", "The revenge of the back-channel"

Of course, I will be at Joi's dinner even though he will be there only virtually.

Hope to see you all there !

What do you think of Nike's sponsored weblog "Art of Speed" ?

I have been following the launch of Nike's sponsored weblog, Art of Speed since its launch.

Are you reading it ? What do you think about the experiment and do you think it is going to be successful ? For the time being I think it is a good idea but the execution does not make it a weblog I want to read every day.

What is your opinion ?

French demonstrations actions shut off Prime Minister Raffarin's home power supply

"EDF-GDF, our French Electricity national company managed to shut off power supplies of homes of powerful politicians such as Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

The government plans to partly privatize EDF-GDF and unions started shutting off power supply all around the country. A friend of Mine and entrepreneur, Pascal, got one of his Client stuck in a lift for hours (in French). He calls one of the main French Union, the CGT, terrorists. Many bloggers complain on his note, with nice words such as "Fucking Unionists".

France has a great future, believe us, we are French and we love our country...

The mass market is (still) dead :...

Jeff says (why don't you put more text in my news reader, Jeff, two lines is not enough !!!):

The mass market is (still) dead :...

The mass market is (still) dead : McDonald's has discovered that the mass market is dead.

The mass market gives way to a mass of niches.

The No. 1 hamburger chain has cut its spending on prime-time commercials from two-thirds of its advertising budget to one-third over the past four years and plans to move further away from a one-stop strategy to draw consumers. The money has gone to "all other media"

Pepsi agrees:

"We're looking at the landscape very differently," said Dave Burwick, chief marketing officer at beverage company PepsiCo . "Online will be bigger ... print and outdoor will benefit from where we're going. We're taking dollars directly out of television."

I love Jeff's battle against masses, it reminds me his post at Davos "There are no masses" if I remember well but could not find it in Google.

Yeah, TV and Newspapers lose more audience because they make people passive, the Internet wins because "We are the Media".

The blogger entrepreneurs dinner in Paris

from left to right: Bruno, Pascal, Rodrigo, Patrick, Mathieu, me, Jean-Michel and Pierre

Thanks, Pascal, for having organized this dinner in Paris

This dinner gathered 8 French entrepreneurs bloggers (some of them blog in English) and we decided we would launch a multi-authored blog where we would share our thoughts and ideas about entrepreneurship, open to any entrepreneur as an author.

Who is in to write on it ? I know Paulo is and a few others around Europe. Anybody else ?

The new Movable Type pricing is live

Please find the new Movable Type pricing here. There is also a post on Six Log that explains the changes, we hope they meet your needs better than last time.

The Industry Standard: The Blog

The Industry Standard brand means a lot to me and reminds me of this crazy period, the bad and the good stuff, but the good comes on the top, especially a conference called ib2b at the time: "iB2B: The Other 95% of Internet Business". I had great time there, everybody was only talking about how many Internet startups he was going to launch ! There is a summary of the conference still online here as a collector, where it is not the other 95% of Internet Business, it is the 99% of the companies that disappeared... via [evhead]: The Industry Standard: The Blog
Jimmy Guterman: "For all of us, this is a chance to remain associated with a brand that still means a great deal to us, in whatever form. None of us are getting paid for this (at least I'm not getting paid; compadres, let me know if I'm getting a raw deal). It's a hobby. Hey, it's either this or clean the kitchen."

I don't know where is Osama either

I don't know where is Osama either, but Saddam surely will stay there for a long time.

via Heiko Hebig:

Anyone remembers this Osama bin Laden guy? Supposedly he is hiding in some mountain range in a far-away country. The problem? It's a large territory. To remind everyone: Osama is the guy pictured on the right.

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai puts it nicely:

I have not seen any such evidence to suggest definitely that we are getting closer to arresting Osama bin Laden. But we have gotten close to arresting him a number of times.

In other words: he has no idea.

By the way: is anyone still looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

First worm for mobile phones discovered

I think the last place where I want a virus is probably my phone... It already rings too much.

Want your MT3 blog in Portuguese ? Weblog.com.pt is here !

Paulo Querido, Journalist and founder of the largest blog platform in Portugal, Weblog.com.pt has chosen Movable Type 3.0 to power his blog platform, that hosts more than 1000 blogs in Portugal and growing.

Look forward to hosted MT3 blogs there very soon, right now it is still under version 2.661.

Thanks for your trust, Paulo, this is I believe our first MT hosting partnership in Europe [disclosure: we partner with portals and hosting companies to provide a full package of blogs, hosting and community, Paulo is doing all three of these]

Secret picture

This picture was embargoed until Andrew joined ze team. This was last month in California, not everybody in the team was there unfortunately.

Are you my friend yes or no ?

"The new social software turbo-charges friendships, sexual hookups and the business of human relationship -- and could turn our lives into an open book. Part 1 of a two-part series." Marc and Joi compete in this Salon.com article about social software (be warned if you are not a subscriber you can view the article but after a very long full page video ad... still it is worth it).

I have never even tried to compete with them with my 413 Linked In friends (which is the one I use the most, almost daily), I should use Orkut more, I only have 71 friends there :=)

The question is what is a friend ?

Good question. Both travel getting cheaper and the Internet of course gets us all closer. We used to have school friends (we still have) because it was the only way to find friends, the local way.

I like this new way of finding friends as I have met extraordinary people (more through my blog that is also social software of course) that I would have never met otherwise, but the first thing I want is of course to meet them in reality, and this is why I enjoy the blogger dinners.

I guess my new definition of a friend is somebody I share a lot of common interests or passions, they can be business or personal passions. Therefore many people with passion about blogging are my (new) friends. I probably have to blog about kite surfing (I don't have the time) to find new friends around but these friends I actually prefer to find them on the beach where I do kite surfing.

I guess social software is really helpful to gather people with the same business or personal interests that would not meet easily without it.

Now I am not sure I would change my orkut profile like Marc did to "open mariage" (I would not anyway, righ :=) even for fun. Of course it says something about you and if I had an open mariage which is not the case, I guess I would not show it to all my contacts...

What is your definition of a friend ?

Looks like Christian is doing nice demos at Nokia press conferences

Christian at Nokia moblogged from his phone into his Typepad account using "photoblog" and the ATOM API in front of an audience of journalists from all around the World.

I love his timeline moblog on his blog, and actually its whole blog design template.

I can't tell more, but Christian sure will do soon :=)

Weblogs.com stops hosting free weblogs

All weblogs.com free weblogs are now replaced by this post, where Dave Winer explains the situation in details in this audio blog post.

The third political party in the UK is now an anti-Europe one

Just heard it on the late news: Robert Killroy Silk and his anti-Europe party the UKIP got huge success yesterday in the UK.

The Times online article says:

"Robert Kilroy-Silk said today that he was looking forward to "wrecking" the European Parliament after being elected as a UK Independence Party member in the European elections.

Eleven of the UKIP's new MEPs gathered in Westminster this morning to toast their party’s spectacular election success with English sparkling wine."

They never drink champaign in public because it is French !

Hey friends from the UK, what do you think about this anti-Europe raising movement in your country ?

I think it is really bad that we have such parties across Europe.

Record low European elections turnout

Europeans do not care about Europe.

The European elections gave 350m voters in 25 countries the chance to vote, but the mood of discontent was also reflected in a record low turnout of about 45 per cent - down from 49 per cent in 1999.