A very good question to discuss, with all frequency of planes growing daily, unconditional weather, delays, and plus now double security checks, traveling has become a nightmare. What will amuse the human being in 15 years to still think that flights are attractive is technology and the use of it in costumer side. More analysis to come in this topic.

DLD was popular this week, this shows an increase of Blog Trends report in the graph below.

Here is the trend graph of recent months popularity of these social networks:

Meanwhile I will have a possibly to present my open stage proposition: How innovative projects can transform education and ICT opportunities. (Your vote and support is highly appreciated at this stage).

And the most important part is to meet with network of people i created last year, compliments to LIFT team for making the event this year much more valuable to be part of it.

LIFT Conference is about to start soon, this time richer with program attached with preliminary network using social media softwares. As last year main discussion during the breaks was Twitter, this year it Facebook will dominate the field. The recent report provided by Glen O’Neil on Network Mapping shows the increase of network among participants, this time I expect an increase of 30% of contacts in Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

Web.Start is the first conference in Southeastern Europe focused exclusively on Web applications and Web startups. The conference takes place on May 17-18th, 2007, in Zagreb, Croatia. The conference is being organized by the Croatian Association of software and online entrepreneurs Initium.

This is the event I would like to attend, but I’m already booked to be in Vienna, Austria as a ICT Jury Member for Balkan Case Challenge Competition. Now that information is doubling every 2nd day, the events seems to be going that way too. I like the initiative of Web Conference in South East Europe. If its going to continue I can easily say: See you next year.

Therefore, I would like to give some small recommendations to the organizers:
1) Start spreading the words in Blogosphere at least 6 months before the event.

2) Blog more about the event, i like the Joel Spolsky video, but your blog has to be much richer. Its nothing shame if you also invite Jason Calacanis and if he cant make it to update in blog that he is not coming, at least we know u gave a try.

3) Participants can also contribute writing in their blogs, so participants link is much more what is web about than trying to stay corporate business conference style. In some events I go after I see that my acquaintances are attending too.

4) Do a live coverage as it happens, by using life stream services and web services such as Flickr, Youtube and Wiki’s.

See you next year.

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Wikipedia.org

Florence Devouard the chairwoman of Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia spoke about “Wikipedia: a social innovation ?” at LIFT07 on February 8, 2007 she covered the basic facts of wikipedia worldwide and the comparisons between the other encyclopedia and wikipedia model, she also mentions wikipedia upcoming solutions such as delivery wikipedia entries in other formats for the countries not having access online such as freely licensed text-books that will make another revolution education in future.

Wikipedia.org invites everyone to take a part online and create articles they opened the gate for online citizens, to contribute on the website of entire humanity, letting people to create articles and make them responsible for the content they create.

But what remains the biggest challenge for Wikipedia is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) since many users today are using the biased sources from text-books who are also biased on their way as a reference to create articles. This brings controversy among many online activists who try to create articles based on facts as a primary source.

An example can be Kosovo article in Wikipedia which is still stub and closed for editing cause of vandalism by contributors, if you monitor this page u can see the history of editing is much frequented and never the truth appears on the Kosovo article. So there is a lot to do in NPOV

Apart from the Florence discussion, there was a simple mistaken discussion about that Wikipedia has money for another three months which got exploded in Blogosphere the next day after her speech and this is what makes blogging attractive. The video explains it all on what Florence Devouard and Laurent Haug really discussed.

Language is major issue on wikipedia which seems to be very English-centered way of creating articles. On wikipedia stats regarding the languages I took these facts about wikipedia articless in languages around in balkans, where Romanian language leads in there.

Romanian: 58 496 articles
Slovenian: 45 900 articles
Serbian: 43 824 articles
Bulgarian: 37 533 articles
Croatian: 29 414 articles
Bosnian: 17 259 articles
Albanian: 14 279 articles
Macedonian: 9 348 articles

Enjoy the Wikipedia story on LIFT07