Archive for the 'Web2.0' Category

For some reason this “web” conference has been transformed into a political rally.

• First, this morning Shimon Peres shows up to talk about world peace.
• This afternoon, out of the blue, we’re supposed to welcome Nicholas Sarkozy (UMP).
• And equally unexpected we just had a political statement by his political counterpart François Bayrou (UDF)

This bothers me a lot:

• Loic Lemeur might have political ambitions, right in time for the French Presidential race, but that does not mean he has to turn a conference about technology and social software into a political forum
• I have tremendous respect for Mr. Peres, but this is not the time nor place to have this kind of presentation.
• I did not pay over €600 (fee/hotel/travel) to come and listen to self-involved French politicians talk about why they want to run for president
• The whole conference scheme has been changed and compressed for allowing hours of (for most of us) irrelevant monologue
• Loic was proud that 55% of attendees were not French, but then he gives the stage to French candidates speaking French

I’m pissed off, and I’m certainly not the only one!

Le Web 3 has just passed the 400 attendees, and of those, 12 are Belgians – that’s an extra 10 after my last post. Quite some familiar faces, and some new ones:

• 20- Clo Willaerts – Belgacom Skynet – BE
• 23- Peter Forret – Forret.com BVBA – BE
• 25- Kris Hoet - Microsoft EMEA- BE
• 27- Simon McDermott - Attentio – BE
• 29- Bart De Waele - Netlash – BE
• 39- Luc Van Braekel – Intersight NV – BE
• 76- Christophe Bouten – BE
• 145- Caroline Maerten – Antidot – BE
• 156- Robin Wauters – VNU Business Publications – BE
• 176- Luc Eeckhout – VNU Business Publications – BE
• 217- Geert Desager - Microsoft – BE
• 247- Edouard de Witte – RTL Digital/RTL Belgium – BE

(from leweb3.com)

If you still want to join, hurry: in 2 days the price jumps from €300 to €500 !

PDF Documents

Playing around with embedded Google calendars and reading “Google Apps and the power of embedded functionality“, I got to thinking: what would be other good candidates for a 1-click-embedding provider of other types of documents. I wondered e.g. whether there was something like Youtube for audio (yes, there is. GoEar.com is one example). But then I thought of a document type we all have learned to love and hate: Adobe’s Portable Document Format or PDF.

The idea behind the PDF file format is valuable: create a cross-platform standard for exchanging and printing documents that includes the text, images, fonts and their layout. The Acrobat Reader is a free application, and while Adobe’s PDF Writer is a commercial product (from $299), there are enough free alternatives to counter that. The thing is: PDF is great for printing, but not for browsing.

When you click on a PDF link, one of multiple things might happen:

• If the web server does not send a header “Content-Type: application/pdf“, your browser has no clue what to do with the file: it will let you download the file and that’s all
• if Acrobat is not installed, you can also only download the file, because your browser will not know what to do with files of type application/pdf
• if Acrobat is installed, but you work with a browser that is not tightly linked to the OS (e.g. Firefox on Windows), it still might not open in Acrobat.
• if your browser has configured Acrobat as a helper application, the file will download and will then be opened with the reader. So you will have 2 applications open: your browser and Acrobat Reader. This is actually the best method.
• With Internet Explorer on Windows, Acrobat will open inside your browser, and your menu bar will become an interesting mix of IE and Acrobat options. (Where is the print button? Ah-ha!!) When you close the browser, a copy of Acrobat will continue to run in an invisible way, taking up some 32MB of memory
• If you had no indication how big the PDF file was, you might be fiddling your thumbs for the next 5 minutes while the document is being downloaded.
• If the document uses fonts that you don’t have, you might be looking at a very weird layout

So you are screwed if you don’t have Acrobat, if it is a really big document or if you access through a misconfigured browser. This is the equivalent of clicking on a .AVI movie file without a clue of how big the movie is, whether you have the necessary audio and video codecs to see it, and whether it’s worth it. If that was largely solved by a service provider like Youtube, what would a similar service for .PDF files look like?
Continue reading ‘Youtube for PDF: embedding documents’

I was doing it anyway, but now Flickr is pissing me off:

Eventhough it is true:

The Flickr service makes it possible to post images hosted on Flickr to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display images hosted on flickr.com must provide a link back to Flickr from each photo to its photo page on Flickr.
from Flickr terms

isn’t it weird to give two options, and more or less say that the second one is illegal? “Good morning sir, you can park your car over there or right here. Unfortunately, in the second case I will have to give you a fine. Have a nice day!”

Maybe this would be a better user interface: