Scripting News for 6/7/2007

Grazia, buon giorno, immobiliare! 

So many thanks to my hosts in Copenhagen, and in Italia.

Especially in Genova and Milano, where they have blogger communities that remind me very much of the one in Greensboro I met a few years back. I told them about the strange little city in North Carolina with more bloggers per capita than San Francisco, Cambridge or Sunnyvale.

They were so gracious and so well-informed. In both places, they asked me about Hypercamp, an idea that I have to admit, no one in California has ever invited me to discuss, to my chagrin. I suggested that Hypercamp was not their next step, that they ought to try a structured unconference, like BloggerCon, with fully empowered and respected discussion leaders who are benevolent dictators, cutting off people who repeat themselves or who promote their products or companies, calling on people with important ideas and perspectives even if they don’t have their hands raised, and where there are no presentations, no panels, no speakers and no audience.

They have had a lot of BarCamps, of all flavors, all over the country, and they are looking for the next thing to do.

I asked that they please consider creating a small subset of their interests on an English-language blog, so we can integrate their work with that of bloggers in the non-Italian speaking world, which is virtually everywhere but Italy. These are very smart, very good, very natural-born bloggers, and it would be great if they could share their enthusiasm and knowledge with all of us around the world. I pointed out that Italy is a popular tourist destination. Wouldn’t it be great to have a TouristCamp, where people come from all over the world to taste La Dolce Vita while they work on new ideas and technology for social networking over a plate of delicious Italian food, breathing fresh Mediterranean air?

In other words, would Italy like to be our host? All that’s standing in the way, imho, is a little international outreach.

More to say, when I get some of that famous perspective that comes from sleeping and walking and breathing, back home in California.

Prrrrrego! 🙂

Pics from Pisa 

Here are the much-delayed pictures from my day in Pisa (Tuesday). Click back in the sequence to see all 10 pics.

Homeward bound 

My clock is all kablooey again.

After the very nice blogger dinner in Milano on Wednesday night, I got a ride with Gaspars, a blogger from Como, to a hotel near the Malpense airport, where after logging in, I got three hours sleep before I had to wake up, shower and get over to the airport to make a 6:15AM flight.

On the way to the airport Gaspars asked what was the most impressive thing I saw in Italy, and I hesitated, explaining that I figure things like that out after I have a chance to walk and sleep and process all the events. But I answered anyway. The ruins of ancient Rome. (And I was thinking the beauty of Italian women.)

Anyway when I woke up this morning, it was 7PM Wednesday night in Berkeley. That’s important because in a few minutes, when I board the plane to SFO, I’ll switch my watch to that time zone. At that time it will be 2AM. I still will have only slept 3 hours in the last 24.

By the time I get to Berkeley, it will be 3PM local time (which is midnight in Europe).

Will I sleep on the plane? Should I try? (My guess is not. It would be better to arrive exhausted, and then, again, try to stay up as late as I possibly can, to get my sleeping clock synched up with local time.)

But we’ll find out.

And it’s also worth mentioning that KLM said my return reservation had been cancelled and rebooked six times since I arrived in Europe. I had a major panic in Pisa when I saw that my reservation had been cancelled on the KLM website. It took two long calls over two days to get it reinstated, but when I arrived at the airport today in Milan, it was cancelled again. It took a lot of insisting I wasn’t going to leave without a boarding pass to actually get one, and they had to issue a hand-written one because the system wouldn’t let them print a boarding pass.

Then it occurred to me that it’s possible that somehow someone who reads this blog and saw I was returning via Milan, guessed which flight I was on (not too hard, there’s only one way to connect from Milan to SFO each day) and it doesn’t require a password or mother’s maiden name to cancel a reservation. Scary thought. Reading in yesterday’s WSJ or IHT (can’t remember which) that printed tickets are going to be completely phased out soon, this is not a pleasant thought. Seems they’d better get some kind of identity system going for the online ticketing system before making the full switchover? Not sure about this, obviously. It’s totally possible that it was a computer glitch or a leftover Y2K bug that kept knocking my reservation off the system.