6 billions others

I just stumbled upon the latest project of Yann Arthus-Bertrand: 6 milliards d’autres. After the Earth from above, we can discover 6000 interviews of random people across 65 coutries. Each person get to talk about their own lives, what the dreamt of as a child, what they are scared of, when they last laughed or cried, and many more personal question. It’s really a wonderful work. It’s really interesting to see a large range of people answering these kind of question you really don’t get to ask or answer that often in real life.

Some videos are also availabe throught Apple France’s website: Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Daelomin: This is pretty similar to what you talked a few years ago.

Discovering the fragmented Web 2.0

I find it rather funny when somebody I know is discovering something on the web I've been using for month, which seem like years really.

Pil just discovered Facebook and online social networks. Those have been around for a while, some have had appeal, others are attracting crowds. They all have similar features but it's what they have specific that make or breaks them. Facebook has this nice picture tagging feature or the friend game. There's really a myriad of those sites, which is rather unfortunate.

When I saw Eric and Kris, we talked about Web 2.0 and how some people are just discovering it. It happens Eric hadn't heard of some of like flickr and just heard of digg. It's rather nice to see how fast people catch on those. But I'm bothered by the fragmentation of it all, especially social networks. It's painful to have to sign up to 5 different sites to keep track of friend that way. I'd just use email since that's universal but it's so old school. Seriously though, there should be some kind of common ground for those sites. Signing up on one and accessing what's on another should work. The current situation is very similar to instant messaging. It's fragemented and incompatible although all too similar. Imagine if emails were that way. If you had to sign up to a new provider each time you want to contact a friend on that network.

Spam-prevention bots sucks

Blogger's spam-prevention bots locked this blog for some reason. Somebody has written some bad code somewhere or are my blog post just spam-like? Am I making links to dodgy websites all the time? My guess would be somebody needs to review their code or their programmers.

This locks comes with a warning on top of the posting creation page. It is impossible to post and saving as draft is the only option left. The page What's a spam blog? explains what spam blog is according to Blogger, linking to Wikipedia (not unlike what I often do).

Maybe some joker just flagged my blog as spam, that would mean Blogger doesn’t have silly bots but silly visitors, which can’t be a crime under the sun.

Update: Blogger was fast to fix the problem after it was reported, in only a few hours the lock was removed.

Dell's discriminatory €6

A sibling of mine is looking for a laptop to purchase. After looking at Apple's Powerbooks we checked out Dell.
Dell Benelux is charging €6.05 more for a system with Windows Vista in French rather than in Dutch. They briefly explain that they pre-install Dutch Vista on all systems and that doing so in French is extra work for them. This is rather discriminatory against French speaking people in Belgium. When I ordered mine, I did not get any extra charge for an English XP.

In any case, it’s a shame their doing this kind of thing. Whether it is Dutch, English or French, neither should be more expensive. Those are pretty standard in Benelux. I'd understand it if it were for a distant language like Themne or even Spanish.