Sunday, January 30, 2000

5:30PM EC: Just heard King Abdullah of Jordan speak. Fantastic speech. Today is his birthday. "Some people wish for peace for our children and their children. This is not enough. We must insist on peace for ourselves." This is cool. There's nothing wrong with selfishness when it comes to peace. He also called the Israelis his brothers. Yes!

The next plenary session is on Russia. And tomorrow's first session promises to be a real hottie. Bill Gates and Steve Case on the same stage.

One more thing before I go hear from the leaders of Russia. The reason I can update the site in real-time is that I have a workstation about 1 minute from the plenary hall, with a multi-megabit connection thanks to Nortel Networks and the space contributed by WorldLink, the magazine of the World Economic Forum.

Three days into the Davos meeting I am in the flow. I've got the whole thing working, well almost, I still haven't managed to send out yesterday's DaveNet. Next time I travel I'll have the mail-sending script running on one of the California or Seattle servers. Needless to say there's no time to write that script now.

I didn't shoot pics of Bill Gates. No one else was taking pictures, and I wanted to be careful.

BTW, if you haven't seen Clinton's speech at Davos, I highly recommend it. CNN only picked up soundbites. I was cheering while I watched it. As you know, I am not a Clinton fan. I'm going to look for a pointer to the webcast.

Another BTW, guess who was outside the Gates press lunch, shaking hands, both before and after? (Steve Case.)

Yesterday at a lunch for media leaders we went round and introduced ourselves. I sat a table with Russian press people. They were the wildest most interesting bunch. I have some pictures, but they're still in the camera. The lunch was well attended, even though it was sandwiched between the Clinton speech and the demonstrations (which got right to the doorstop of the Hotel Rinaldi where we were dining before the polizei were able to erect an effective barricade). The other people were mostly editors, publishers and CEOs of big big publishing companies. I was the only web publisher present. Each of us were asked to say what our biggest challenges were in the last year, and what our biggest challenges are for the coming year. About 20 people went before me, and for the most part the answers were the Internet and the Internet. When I got up I told them the story of Scripting News and EditThisPage.Com. I said our biggest challenge last year was to make writing for the web easy. Our challenge for this year is to start a million new sites. I told them our new motto (see the tagline at the top of this page) and told them it was open source, they could use it themselves. As long as you align your interests with the Internet, you can't lose. I see this statement as being right in line with what Clinton said. I wasn't kidding about wanting to meet with him. I will try to do that when I get back to the US.

Phil Wolff found a WEF press release on the 10 Websites session on Thursday.

I just had a few minutes to catch up on the DG and wanted to point to Jakob Nielsen's comments about boldening text. He wants to talk about that at PC Forum along with Dan Bricklin, and no doubt we will do that.