The Forum d’Avignon is an annual meeting of invited guests, heavily from
the French culture industries, with a handful of Internet people sprinkled
in, and interesting international representation. It is a high end conference
for sure: beautiful hotels in beautiful Avignon, a welcome reception in the
historic and ornate Town Hall, dinner in the Palais de Papes — the Palace
of Popes, a visit from Pres. Sarkozy in a couple of hours. The sessions
themselves are held in a long hall lined with seats facing one another. The
overall topic this year — the 4th annual Forum — is “investing in
culture.” The sessions consist of group interviews in the middle.
James “Jamie” Boyle is here, I’m very happy to say. He speaks tomorrow.
They sat me next to him at dinner last night (yay!) and among other wise
things, said that conferences always have narratives. It’s not yet clear to
... (more)
They move us into the grand hall — vaulted ceilings — for a talk
by Pres. Nikolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy has not exactly been a friend of the
Internet. The last time I heard him talk was at LeWeb when he was a
candidate. Among the three candidates who spoke there, Sarkozy’s talk was
clearly the most hostile to the Internet, viewing it primarily as a site of
gossip and slander.
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key
information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small
matters. Paraphrasing A SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION badly. ... (more)
Google has announced that it is retiring Needlebase, a service it acquired
with its ITA purchase. That’s too bad! Needlebase is a very cool tool.
(It’s staying up until June 1 so you can download any work you’ve done
there.)
Needlebase is a browser-based tool that creates a merged, cleaned, de-duped
database from databases. Then you can create a variety of user-happy outputs.
There are some examples here.
Google says it’s evaluating whether Needlebase can be threaded into its
other offerings.
... (more)
From Techdirt:
Kader Arif, the “rapporteur” for ACTA, has quit that role in disgust over
the process behind getting the EU to sign onto ACTA. A rapporteur is a person
“appointed by a deliberative body to investigate an issue.” However, it
appears his investigation of ACTA didn’t make him very pleased:
I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that
led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society
organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations,
repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an ex... (more)
Jeff Jarvis is giving a lunch time talk about his new book, Public Parts. He
says he’s interested in preserving the Net as an open space. Privacy and
publicness depend on each other. Privacy needs protection, he says, but we
are becoming so over-protective that we are in danger of losing the benefits
of publicness. (He apologizes for the term “publicness” but did not want
to use the marketing term “publicity.”)
NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key
information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small
matters. Paraphrasing badly... (more)