Sifry’s Alerts

Made it to the Les Blogs conference, and after the introductions, Shel Israel and Robert Scoble are now on stage giving their presentation/conversation about their new book, “Naked Conversations” and related blog. I received a review copy of the book by the way, and I have to say that it is very well done. For most people who are new to blogs, they have done a great job at explaining Cluetrain fundamentals, and they have expounded on it and done a great job at showing the application of the fundamentals – what Doc calls “Applied Cluetrain”. Looking forward to when the book comes out so that I can recommend it to folks to get at bookstores.

Some pictures from the opening session, from right to left: Loic Lemeur, the organizer of the conference, introducing the conference, Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices, and Shel Israel and Robert Scoble discussing their book.

Lots of kind people complimenting the Technorati team for all of our recent performance, scalability, and feature improvements lately, too. Makes me grateful for the wonderful team toiling away back in San Francisco. Thanks, guys!

Technorati Tags: lesblogs, paris, technorati

I had a wonderful walk around the Arc de Triumph this evening, just the thing that helped keep the jetlag at bay. I’ve organized them into a set on flickr, and I’ll be adding more throughout the trip.

Twilight is one of the most beautiful times to photograph, colors just jump out as contrast is reduced, and the combination of warm tungsten lighting with the cool light from the sky brings out such interesting compositions. This one just looked timeless to me. I liked the composition and colors of this one, and you have to look at this one carefully, the woman is going over to an expensive fur shop to show her beau something she likes.

Enjoy. More later.

Technorati Tags: flickr, lesblogs, paris, photography, twilight

And boy are my arms tired. My California clock says it is 7:32am, but local time says it is 4:30pm. I’ve got to find a way to stay on my feet long enough to make it to an early sleep to beat the jetlag. The drive in ended with a beautiful drive down the center of Paris, and I’ve even got a view of the Eiffel Tower from my room (yeah, it’s right next to that big satellite dish)

I think I’ll run out and take some twilight shots, glad I brought my mini tripod and some fast lenses…

Technorati Tags: lesblogs, paris, photography

I had a very pleasant time speaking with Nicole Simon of bloxpert.com last week, and she has just put up the podcast of our interview. I’ve had a few recent interviews/podcasts lately, now that I actually have a little time, I’ll have to go search them down and post links to them, more in coming posts. I’m sitting in a wifi lounge in Amsterdam Airport, paying 6 euros for 30 minutes of access which feels a bit steep. But at least my new universal world plug is working well. Thanks to KLM for the outlet! As a pretty experienced power vampire, I was pretty surprised to not find many outlets along the walls in the terminals, but they did have a few power stations set up in the internet terminal.

One jarring fact – they play The Daily Show on CNN International over the terminal monitors – I wonder how many non-americans think it is a serious news program? Heh.

Technorati Tags: airport, airport, podcast, powervampire, amsterdam

A couple weeks ago, I had the honor to be invited to Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium conference. This is a yearly event put on by the HBS studentson the latest trends in technology, and it was quite an interesting conference. While I was there, I attended John Palfrey’s excellent session on Intellectual Property law. But the real reason for this blog entry is to post some pix of Doc and Halley at Harvard…

And of course, my favorite. Click on each to get the full-size picture.

I’m sitting here at SFO getting ready for the long flight to Amsterdam, heading to Les Blogs. I got invited to the first one, organized by the remarkable Loic Lemeur, but I was unable to attend last year. After hearing about it, I resolved to make sure I didn’t miss it this year. I’m also testing out some new photo workflow on my Mac – I’ve finally completely moved away from iPhoto – which, while fine for small collections, is just atrocious and buggy for avid photographers like myself. I recently plunked down the cash and bought iView Media Pro 3, and so far it has been meeting my expectations. It certainly has a much fuller set of features, more natural inclusion of RAW images into workflow, and much better natural metadata support. The only thinkg that bugs me now is the loss of simple imports of photos from my memory cards into the program, and I’m also debating the “one large catalog to hold them all” or the “many small catalogs all combined into sets” philosophies.

In short I’m just surprised I even have time to think about this stuff right now, life and work have been so incredibly busy that I haven’t had the few moments or tranquility of mind to sit down and just write. I hope that this short trip to Paris (my first!) will provide me with some time to step out of the trenches a bit and think about some more big picture stuff. Perhaps even blog more!

If you’re going to be out in Paris at the show and you want to get together, drop me a line. And I’m always looking for interesting things to do and photograph during the off hours…

Technorati Tags: lesblogs, paris, photography, iviewmediapro