Switzerland

Sleeping, in a different place than usual.

Port of Nyon in Winter The picture above was done with an iphone and the autostitch application. To produce this type of photograph the process is simple. You take a series of pictures with the Iphone camera before going to the autostitch application. You select the photographs that you want stitched together and click the stitch button. The application will then find objects within the photograph before combining them into one panoramic shot. Once the image is processed you have the option of either saving the picture as it is or cropping it to remove the edges hence giving this type of result.

[caption id=“attachment_1111” align=“aligncenter” width=“265” caption=“A funny idea”][/caption] It’s April fool’s day and the swiss have taken advantage of their reputation to start a funny promotional campaign. It’s about the birds soiling the mountains and having crews of people specifically to resolve this problem. Of course it’s an April fool’s joke.

warzabidul - Feb 4, 2009

What makes the first meetups so great is that you spend weeks and months talking to people, you develop a relationship with those people so that when you finally meet them you’re really happy. That feeling is made even nicer when you realise you have similar interests to people you had not met yet.

Now the tweetups and other meetings often feel like a formality, nothing fun, nothing innovative. That is not to say that I don’t like tuttle. In fact I do like tuttle because there you still have that young entrepreunerial spirit, those innovators and thinkers. There’s a lot to be gained from the tuttle meetups. That’s a concept that works really well in my eyes.

There is a video of me at the only Twestival event I have ever been to and I lay into the event for the fashionistas that attended the event. I was so disappointed with the event as a whole that I have lost my passion for going to social media events, especially when I need to travel over a thousand kilometers. Environmental conscience is one good reason for not travelling to these events but the second is the quality of the people there. When I talked to people at the Twestival event and asked them about twitter they looked at me strangely, when I asked them about how many tweets they had written they told me from five to two hundred on average. As a passionate twitter user and having been to a lot of social media events, tweetups and seesmeetups this really dissapointed me. The event felt like nothing more than a facade, nothing more than an opportunity for people to say “look at how trendy I am, I’m on twitter” yet not understanding anything about the ethos of the twitter way of life. I love twitter, and I love those that use it well, I love how certain people use it the same way they use sms and other social means. I don’t like that in Switzerland I’m strange because I use twitter. I like it even less that over here twitter will never be popular. There is no reason for it because of social cohesion, but also a far smaller community. Switzerland is about skiing, sailing, cycling, hiking, parapente and more sports. We’re not in a city. We’re in the countryside, Europe’s playground. Why be geeky when sports would be more social. More to the point everything is current. I don’t need to wait two to five years for people to adopt the sports. That’s why I’m coming back to Twitter on Valentine’s day. (It’s also the day I got my driving licence ;-))

An American in France - Jan 1, 2009

You blog is gorgeous. I will be back to this blog. I have a blog about France, which is my baby right now. -melaniekraus from twitter

Glad you like it :-), I’ll spend time looking at yours, watching a documentary at the moment.

One of my biggest frustrations at the moment as a user of twitter is that I can’t meet with the people I chat with on a regular basis. As a result of this I am trying to find as many Geneva based twitter users as possible to organise a tweetup. There are two options, the first is to do it at the same time as twestival but that is one event that I personally want to have nothing to do with. I was disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm that people at that event had for twitter. As a result I would prefer not to repeat that experience. What has been suggested by Sandrine is a tweetup at the same time as the LIFT09 conference is taking place in Geneva. For those that are not familiar with LIFT09:

Today it snowed.

Whilst the connection is unstable and slow I decided to take the phone and Qik some landscapes from La Dole in Switzerland. Here are a few streams. As more people enjoy streaming live video from interesting locations so this will become a more common site. What I hope to do next is go to some of the higher peaks and stream from there too. Overtime we could have a nice collection of footage.

A place to seesmic from