danah boyd

Ironically, I was emailing to ask for her new postal address!

::wave:: I’m danah’s email bot.

I’m here to tell you that danah is off celebrating the completion of her PhD without the Internet or email. She will be gone until January 19 and decided to take an email sabbatical. This means that no emails received during her vacation will be stored, including your message. In other words, she will NOT receive your message. It won’t be waiting for her because I’ve been instructed to throw everything away so that she can come home to a little less stress.

If you feel as though your message is still relevant post-Jan 19, you should email her again then. If it is uber urgent and you know how, contact her mother or brother.

For good reason, danah believes that a vacation is spoiled by coming home to an inbox that is a mile high filled with requests for things to do. When danah returns, she will be starting a new job and she wants to be at her best without such a crazy backlog. For more information on danah’s email sabbatical philosophy, check out her blog.

I apologize for danah’s quirkiness. She’s definitely an odd duck. But it’s been a rough race to the dissertation finish line and I think that she deserves a proper break from the world. I hope you do too.

— “taken out of context i must seem so strange” –

Any other suggestions?

Note to self: Remember to bring a jacket when traveling from Hong Kong to Paris in mid-December.

Combining proprietary information and information from the Internet, Offbeat Guides cover 30,000 destinations around the world.

Since each guide is unique, this start-up could make David the most prolific author in history.

More on Ola below from this video:

For many entrepreneurs, the lone goal has become survival. At Seesmic, a video blogging service, the day of reckoning — when it runs out of the $6 million it raised in May — will come in three years. To make the money last, Loïc Le Meur, the chief executive, recently laid off seven employees, or one-third of his staff, and cut all projects not directly related to the video service.

“If I can’t make this work in three years it will be a failure,” Mr. Le Meur said. “If I can and I get through this, it will be much stronger.”

Good luck to Loic and the reduced Seesmic team!

Joi Ito

The book gathers photos of Joi’s friends, including myself and many of the world’s digital elite. All photos are released under a Creative Commons license that allows them to be reproduced in Wikipedia, in newspapers, etc.

In addition to the photos, the book includes essays by Howard Rheingold, Lawrence Liang, Cory Doctorow, Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao and Marko Ahtisaari along with a foreword by Lawrence Lessig.

In this video Christopher Adams, the book’s designer and publisher, talks with Joi about the concept and style of the book.

More on the project and updates of when the book is available can be seen at Freesouls.cc

Those joining include Esther Dyson, Tyler Brûlé, Thomas Glocer, Yat Siu, Aditya dev Sood, Lars Hinrichs, Joshua Schachter, Brian Behlendorf, Ami Hasan, Daniel Sachs, Joshua Cooper Ramo, Kim Weckström, and Azeem Azhar. Saul Klein, who invested in the second round, also invested in the previous round together with Martin Varsavsky, Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito.

The founders and many of the investors are good friends of mine, but believe me when I say that Dopplr is a great and focused online community.

It is the one online service where I only connect to people with whom I really am friends. Congrats to Matt, Matt, Lisa, Dan and Marko!

Unlike The Joy Luck Club or her film and TV appearances, this work – starring Amy – was intended for a highly select and small audience (1 person).

Some of the images appear in Amy’s excellent TED talk on Creativity.

Enjoy!

All three have strong links to Silicon Valley, but only Loic is currently launching a company there.

Loic moved from Paris to San Francisco last year to launch Seesmic, a community for video conversation. San Francisco has been treating Loic well and from his level of enthusiasm it does not sound like he will be moving back to Europe anytime soon.

“You can succeed in Europe, but only locally,” Loic said. “You are more likely to have a global hit if you are based in San Francisco.” A European website must be translated into 22 languages in order to reach the same potential audience as an American website in English.

A further advantage of the US, Loic added, is the network effect. “In San Francisco everyone is just one block away and you can meet them for coffee.”

Martin, whose latest company is Fon, insists that Europe has one great inherent advantage due to lifestyle: “I do my work and then when I go home, I am here in Europe.”

The issue of US vs Europe is one that Martin has considered deeply and has now concluded that it comes down to an issue of lifestyle. “You really have to make a lifestyle choice to see where you set up.”

While the US might have a larger market, Martin said the exchange rate of what he calls the “peso-dollar” means that American companies are making much of their money in Europe.

Japan offers a fairly large and affluent homogenous market, but Joi Ito still tends to invest in the US and Europe.

A key difference of dynamic is that companies can more easily go public in Europe, while US companies look to be acquired. This changes the dynamic under which they are operated.

Technorati Tags: menorcatechtalk2008, menorca, Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Varsavsky, Joi Ito, Joi, seesmic, fon, digital garage, techtalk

For those who have not yet had the pleasure, Bobby stars in a television show about Asian cuisine and runs my favorite Hanoi restaurant. Creatively enough, he calls the place Bobby Chinn. Bobby’s restaurant serves some of the best food in Hanoi and is filled with resident characters of Vietnam.

The biggest character of all – of course – being Bobby and his book is certain to reflect that:

Vietnamese food is the new hip – light, fresh, clean and healthy – cuisine. Who better to delve into its secrets than the most vibrant and renowned exponent of modern Vietnamese cuisine? Hanoi restaurateur and enfant terrible, Bobby Chinn.

Chinn’s first book, Wild, Wild East, gives the most comprehensive account of this diverse and exotic cuisine ever published in English. Sharing his passion for this unique style of cooking, Chinn takes the reader on a journey of discovery into what he believes to be one of the world’s greatest cuisines.

The book is jam-packed with recipes: There are classics such as Prawn and Papaya Salad and “Pho” Rice Noodle Soup, unusual dishes such as Rice Paper Wrapped Foie Gras on Apple Compote, Tamarind and Apple Jus, and plenty of Chinn’s own fusion-style dishes. In addition, the compendium is an authentic guide to Vietnamese food as it is eaten today. Special photography by award-winning photographer Jason Lowe and personal anecdotes from Chinn make this an illuminating culinary tour. Read about his first experiences of running a kitchen, how he found out the recipe for the secret sauce for grilled chicken, and his off-the-wall tales of the more unusual foodstuffs and ingredients.

Technorati Tags: Bobby Chinn, Hanoi, restaurant, Vietnam, Wild wild east

Uber video blogger Robert Scoble announced today at LeWeb3 in Paris that he is leaving Podtech for greener pastures.

Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence while he worked as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He co-authored (with Shel Israel) the book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk.

I caught up with Scoble just after he left the stage and had him describe his plans ahead.

Scoble plans to join Fast Company or start his own company, with the intention of revolutionizing the video format by using top of the line equipment to live broadcasting via mobile phones and such.

Scoble fought against the notion of creating CNN 2.0, insisting that he wanted something entirely new, not something derivative.

More details in the video…

Technorati Tags: Robert Scoble, leweb3, Techpod, Fast Company

Loic summarized:

We feel there is a new generation all around the World, a generation of people who feel more as citizens of the World than their own Country. We felt like trying to describe this generation’s values and called it “the moving circus”, a name Yossi Vardi originally used while we were talking about the fact that we keep seeing each other in all kinds of different events around the World, same cool people, same values, different places.

We tried to define the values of that “moving circus” culture:
-no office
-no boss (self employed)
-no Country (world citizen)
-no race (does not matter)
-no diploma (who cares)
-no smoking (has been)
-no hierarchy (OK, not much hierarchy)
-no political party (!!!, we care more about people than parties)
-no tie, no suit: casual all the time
-no monopoly, no center, everything decentralized
-no religion (not has important as it was before)
-no mariage (not needed to live together)
-in sync: no email, no phone, just IM, twitter, social software…
-no off-line: everything online, Gmail Google apps rather than MS Office
-no distance: it does not matter where you are
-no mass media: they are here but do not matter as much as before
-no fear of embarrassment or of failure: the “always beta” culture
-icons: Hans Rosling, Sergey Brin, Lary Page
-book: The World if Flat from Thomas Friedman
-entrepreneurial or self employed
-ideas over systems
-sharing ideas instead of keeping them secret (authority and power change from people protecting information to people sharing it)
-ethics: environment, …
-global citizen

There’s some reaction on Loic’s blog.

Technorati Tags: Loic Le Meur, moving circus, the moving circus