Google Dev: the Next Big programming Language

Steve Yegge, who is a developer up at Google Kirkland (you can see him in this video tour I did of the Google Kirkland office) has an interesting post titled: The Next Big Language, or NBL for those of you who need three-letter acronymns just to feel sufficiently geeky. Can you guess which language it is?

Yeah, I snuck onto the Wifi network here in Geneva’s airport. Our plane for Munich leaves in 25 minutes.

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Interview with Wikipedia’s chairwoman

The Chairwoman of Wikipedia foundation, Florence Devouard, is interviewed on video by Nicolas Charbonnier and part of her speech at LIFT is online in the last third of his eight-minute video. On screen is a slide showing Wikipedia’s growth, which is one context behind why Wikipedia needs more funds/donations to keep up in the future. When your service is doubling every few months in near-exponential growth you need to think about how you’re going to pay for future servers and pay for more bandwidth. LIFT recorded all of the sessions and will have those videos up in the next couple of weeks.

How did I find this video? I did a Google Blogsearch for “LIFT07.” Blog search is different than using Google’s main engine: it shows you people who have just blogged something in the past few hours and, I’m finding, is an invaluable tool for learning more about news stories that are breaking. I wish more bloggers used blog search to look for additional angles on stories and linked to those — I’m seeing very few bloggers doing this and it leads to meme trackers that only have A-listers like me on them (boring! incomplete! not always accurate!). I haven’t seen this video linked to on TechMeme yet. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s not on Digg or TechMeme (or other meme trackers) over on my link blog as well.

I didn’t know Nicolas until I started doing blog searches for LIFT07, by the way. This is the way to bring new voices and new ideas and new media producers into the conversation. I hope to see more bloggers linking to new things. Even just including a link to a blog search engine like Technorati, Ask’s blog search, or Google’s blog search, at the bottom of your posts would make your posts more useful to your readers.

OK, now I’m off to the airport. See ya on the other side of the Atlantic.

Wikipedia’s quote, from the person on stage

The thing I love about blogging is that everyone involved in a news story can give you their point of view. Here’s Laurent Haug, the founder of LIFT, who interviewed Florence Devouard, of Wikipedia, on stage, and what she said on stage has now been quoted and read around the world. Laurent, last night, went back and looked at the video tape and gave her exact quote and the context in which it was said. He did that because people were reporting that Florence said Wikipedia would shut down in three months if it didn’t get more cash. That is NOT true, based on the transcripts of what she actually said. It’s why I would rather memetrackers (and other bloggers) actually link to people who were in the audience at a news event.

Compare this to the world we used to live in, where journalists would write an article and there was almost nothing the people who were involved in the story could do to augment, correct, or improve on the understanding we all had about a news story. I far, far, far prefer this new world. Thanks, Laurent, for demonstrating what your conference was all about: that the way we share things worldwide has changed. And for the better.

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We’re about to hop on a plane to Munich, then onto SFO. We will be offline for the next 12 hours or so. See ya Sunday night.