The 8th Tunisian blogger meetup will be held tomorrow November 18th at Biwa, behind the Golden Bowling, in Les Berges du Lac at 8PM.
I hope you can all make it and be there. It should be a lot of fun as usual 🙂
Looking forward to seeing you all again and meeting some new people too…
Cya tomorrow…
So, as my previous post already told you all, I was at the Kram Palexpo, as it’s now being called, for the World Summit on the Information Society; One of the greatest events that have ever been held in my dear country Tunisia.
I’d like to talk about the organization a bit before I move on. I think Tunisia has done a really good job organizing this event. The badging process was really smooth and practical even though there were a lot of people. Security is really high. The Kram palexpo has been extended to cover the space needed for the summit, the ICT4ALL expo and all the parallel events. In short, I’m really proud of Tunisia’s organization of the summit.
Now back to the summit itself…
One of the main points everyone was talking about and wondering about going into the summit was Internet Governance; Will it remain in the hands of the US or will a world governing body take it over.
As expected, things will remain as they are with the US holding on to full control of the internet.
News reports chose to put it this way: “the delegates reached to an accord that leaves the supervision of domain names and other technical resources unchanged. They agreed instead to an evolutionary approach to Internet management.”
Which is a nice way to say that the US told everyone to buzz off and keep their hands off the internet.
As I said earlier, I took a quick tour of the ICT4ALL expo, which I will certainly have to go back to in these coming days.
I met a number of old friends (offline ones as well as online ones), as well as some new great and interesting people.
Now, some of you might be asking what I was doing there and how I got in.
Well, today was mainly part of my participation in a really exciting project called ReachOut which is organized by the British Council and CholertonShand, in partnership with the WSIS Youth Caucus.
The project’s idea is to encourage and enable open discussion between young people from Arab countries and the United Kingdom about issues raised by the United Nation’s World Summit on the Information Society.
So a group of really interesting people came together today from different Arab countries (Libya, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia), and we got to know each other, visited the Kram palexpo together, and then went back to the British Council where we had a live video conference with another group of equally interesting people at Oxford University in England.
The topics discussed revolved around the different uses of ICT as a tool for development and its role in globalization, culture, dialogue, e-learning, …etc.
It was a very rich discussion that we all hope to build upon and create projects out of the ideas we’ve been brainstorming about.
The event was and will continue to be blogged live here.
I’ll be going back to the Kram palexpo tomorrow, and will hopefully meet some more interesting people that I’ve gotten to know online and get to talk more to the people I met today.
I will also be taking a lot more pictures and trying to get some good quality ones, as the ones I took today were rushed and ended up not so good.
Anyway, I put some online on my flickr here.
This is a live post from the Kram palexpo, where the World Summit on the Information Society is being held. I’m currently on a tour in the ICT4ALL section where countries and companies from all over the world have put up their shiny stands and presentations, scattered leaflets right and left…etc.
It’s been great meeting a number of old friends from other countries, as well as some new interesting people from all over the world.
There’s certainly a lot of interesting stuff and ideas floating around.
I’ll be taking some photos and writing more about this later, as I still have a lot to see and more people to meet.
Although no specific plans have been made, it seems like executives within Microsoft are examining whether it makes sense to release ad-supported versions of products such as Works, Money, or even the Windows operating system itself.
This comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of Office Live and Windows Live, two products that will be ad-supported complements to its existing desktop software. Microsoft workers maintain that the software maker may be forced to go further if rivals launch ad-supported versions of popular programs such as PowerPoint.
I think it’s interesting that the world’s biggest software maker is thinking about this and slowly moving some of its software online.
It remains to be seen how far they go and how good a strategy this turns out to be in the end. It’s true that online advertising is more mature than it was a few years ago, but I’m still not so sure it’s mature enough to cover such ideas. Or maybe it’s ideas like this that will make it more mature by giving it more important and interesting properties to appear on.
I’m really interested in seeing how all this plays out.
A woman who authorities said had sex with high school boys during alcohol- and drug-fueled parties has been sentenced to 30 years in prison, US officials said.
Silvia Johnson, 41, described herself to investigators as a “cool mom” who “was never popular with classmates in high school” and who was beginning to feel like one of the group.
Authorities said Johnson held parties for the boys almost weekly between October 2003 and October 2004. They said Johnson provided drugs and alcohol to eight boys and had sex with five of them.
Cool mom?!
Just when you think you’ve heard the stupidest thing yet, something like this comes along…
[Via: CNN]
“Technology is a way to simplify a person’s life by complicating it.”
Just a thought that crossed my mind about how we keep on creating new ways to simplify our lives and become lazier, yet these same things end up complicating our life more and adding our dependancy on a number of gadgets, services, resources, sources …etc.
We create ways to move around freely and do anything from anywhere, as a way to feel some freedom, but in the end of the day we’re tying ourselves to all these devices and inventions, and putting ourselves at the mercy of them, their manufacturers, their sources…etc.
We create an illusion of simplicity and freedom while we dive deeper into complexity and tech-slavery.
Man, I can’t get Madonna’s new song Hung Up out of my head.
It’s one of those infectuous tunes and songs that just stick to you and keep going on constant rotation in your head.
It’s off her new album Confessions on a Dance Floor, which will be released tomorrow and is a really cool album with a disco / dance touch.
My favourite songs off the album are: Hung Up, Push, Sorry, Jump, Get Together. Even though the rest of the songs are cool too.
The thing I love about Madonna is how she re-invents herself with every album, setting new trends in the music business, raising the bar and always one step ahead of the pack.
She just rocks!
I totally recommend the single Hung Up and the album Confessions on a Dance Floor for all music lovers.
Last night we watched Crash, featuring a great cast with Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe and a number of other talented actors.
I first heard about this movie when Jason reviewed it, and I thought it sounded like a cool movie.
And well it didn’t let me down, it’s a really interesting and good movie, that I truly enjoyed. It’s one of those movies where Hollywood actually does things right.
The movie is about several characters of different racial backgrounds who collide in one incident, The different stereotypes society has created for those backgrounds affect their judgment, beliefs and actions, in turn causing problems for each of them.
It’s one of those movies that takes bits and pieces of different people’s lives and then ties them all up together at some point.
It reminds me of Magnolia, only I really liked this one better.
The casting was great and all the actors did a very good job. Talking of that, did I ever say that I really like Don Cheadle? He’s a really talented and great actor.
I really recommend this movie for people who enjoy a good, interesting and well-done movie.
My rating for this movie is: 8/10.
The WSIS starts in a few days, and Tunisia has been preparing to show how successful it can and will be at hosting such big and important events.
But, unfortunately, big events like this come with a downside for the internet users of Tunisia.
2 years ago when Tunisia hosted the ICANN meetings; A big share of the national bandwidth was allocated to the hotel the meetings were being held at, as well as the hotels the guests were staying at. This at a time when those places weren’t even covered by broadband connections yet.
That left the rest of Tunisia with really bad internet connections. People at home found it impossible to surf the net, and companies who had leased lines or adsl felt like they were connected through a 56K modem.
It’s a shame that with the WSIS this year, the same problem is happening all over again.
For this past week, connecting through dialup has been near to impossible, and the supposedly higher speed connections have become a lot slower.
I know it’s important that we have high speed internet in the Kram Palexpo and in the hotels the guests are staying at, but we need the internet too, and those connections shouldn’t be provided at our expense.
In the end, this highlights one of the big problems poorer countries face, which is high bandwidth prices, limiting how much they can buy, and making them unable to provide wide-spread higher speed connections at good prices for their citizens.
I hope a solution will be found for this in the summit, for it is one of the main reasons behind the digital divide between countries.
[More (in French): Infinity]
