Read this if you want to know more about me: my new personal website

I just finished to re-write an English (thanks to Jon for correcting it) and French version of my personal web site. I wanted to open myself a little bit more on the cyberspace; I wanted to give the possibility to people to learn who Fred is personally, professionally and in pictures.

More and more people contact me, via my blog and website, for a full of reasons. However, everything is happening on the cyberspace and people sometime have doubts about the authenticity of the people they meet. For that other reason, I wanted to write more things about me: what my profession is and my passions in life as well as publishing hundred of pictures I took around the World in my last trips. That way I wish that people become more comfortable and less shy to talk with me by knowing more things about my personality. That way, I wish that I will increase the trust people have in my cyber-authenticity (so trusting me and my work).

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I will be at the Canadian Semantic Web Working Symposium 2006 in Quebec City the 6th June

Kone Mamadou Tadiou that co-chair the event with Daniel Lemire contacted me two days ago to know if I would be there: sure I will! I registered yesterday and I am impatiently waiting after that event.

The CSWWS will be in conjunction with the Canadian AI-2006 and the International workshop on agents and multiagent systems. If you are interested in Artificial Intelligence, in multiagent systems or in the Semantic Web, you have to be in Quebec City from the 5th to the 9th June.

The computer science department of the Laval University worked hard to get things done with that major Canadian event of 2006. It will be a great opportunity to meet new people, talk about fascinating subjects and to discuss about new academic and commercial projects related with these domains.

I hope to met you there, in one of the most beautiful and enjoyable city on the planet.

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Some screenshots of the next generation of Talk Digger

Recently I wrote some things about what I am currently working on for Talk Digger in some of my last blog posts. One picture worth 1000 words, so I will save time by posting 2 screenshots of that next version (generation?) of Talk Digger.

Before getting a look at them, please have in mind a couple of things:

  1. These screenshots are taken from the prototype web site.
  2. This is just a snippet of what is going on.
  3. I post these screenshots to let people know about what I am currently working on, hoping having feedbacks to improve it.
  4. More information about this new version will follow in the next weeks/months.
  5. Beta testing accounts will be available in a couple of months.

I will not describe everything on these screenshots. I will let them talk by themselves. What I would like is that you write a comment to describe what you think is going on. That way, I will know if users “intuitively” know what it is all about or if what I have done so far is a total piece of crap. It’s a sort of test and experiment.

So let me introduce the idea behind this new development, and after make your mind with these two screenshots.

As you probably know, Talk Digger is: a new way to find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Web. So you have three elements: (1) finding discussions, (2) following discussions and (3) joining discussions.

With the current version of Talk Digger, users get stuck at step one. These new improvements to Talk Digger will let its users to go ahead with the step two and three.

With these new features, Talk Digger will become a social platform that helps people to connect with other people that follow the same stories (the premise here is that people that follow the same discussions will also have some personal and professional interests in common). It will also become a search engine of its own, and not only a meta-one.


Tracking page


(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the screenshot)

Conversation page


(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the screenshot)

Some people could wonder why I make these screenshots available. They are not a state secret?

Fortunately they are not. Since the beginning, Talk Digger evolved with the ideas of its users. The only thing I hope is that it continues that way and it is for that exact reason why I am posting them today. I hope having your feedbacks and your first impressions about what I have done so far.

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Bookmarking discussions using Del.icio.us and TalkDigger

I just discovered some new behaviour from Talk Digger users while I was analyzing the server logs. I found that some users (intentionally or not) are using Del.icio.us not to bookmark Talk Digger’s website, but to bookmark discussions Talk Digger has helped to discover.

How does this work?

1- Someone finds an interesting page somewhere on the Internet and wants to know who else is talking about it. To demonstrate, let’s take an article of the Washington Post called Bush Speaks Out for Rumsfeld.

2- They copy the URL of that web page, and then go to

http://www.talkdigger.com/?dig_url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401649.html



That way they start a search to find the discussion evolving around that piece of news, using Talk Digger.

3- Finally they copy that URL and bookmark it using Del.icio.us. That way they only have to login into their Del.icio.us user account and click on the bookmark to see the discussion they are “tracking” using Del.icio.us.

It’s great that users are sharing with the Del.icio.us community their interests for a particular piece of news (website, blog, etc) by tagging it with different tag names. Then other people from the community can save that same bookmark and start following the discussion too.

If you read my last blog posts about the future of Talk Digger and what I am working on right now, you will probably find out that this is the same idea that is behind the sort of “portal” that I am developing for the “next generation” of Talk Digger.

The purpose of the “portal” will be to help users find other users with the same interests while following a specific conversation that is beginning to evolve on the Internet. The premise of the idea is that people with similar interests will find each other by checking and displaying which users are tracking the same stories.

For now, what is really interesting is to see how users of two totally different web services can use them in conjunction to answer one their persistent needs.

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I am neither a painter nor a writer: I am a software designer

Will software design and development ever will be part of art schools? I doubt it, but why not? After all designing pieces of software is not only technique… it’s art. Like a writer, a painter or a sculptor, software designers use tools to make their ideas real: to share them with other people.

Right now I am prototyping ideas I have for enhancing Talk Digger. My creation process is much more like that of a writer than that of a software developer, an uber-geek.

Ideas pass through my mind; I muse about their utility; I prototype them; I test them; I use them; I play with them; I talk about them with other people; I get feedbacks I integrate these feedbacks into my idea; I change my ideas; I change my works; I delete some prototypes; I go with the flow of my ideas and their evolution.

This is my work.

Sure there are rigid procedures in software development. Yeah there are procedures to design, develop, debug and support software development. Yeah you have to write specifications; yeah you have to perform test cases; yeah you have to do all that … and much more.

However, what I am talking about is the first process, the creative process, the one wherein the technical knowledge does not really matter, the one that will make your software usable; the one that will be so intuitive to use that nobody will think about it but will only think about what they have to do; the one that will help users save time when performing their work. No one needs technical knowledge to develop such software. What he needs is creativity: he needs to be an artist.

It is what I am doing right now. It is the reason why I am not writing that much. I am in a sort of creative mood where I prototype my ideas to make Talk Digger bigger, better and more useful. I try to do these things to achieve Talk Digger’s goal: (1) gathering the best information, (2) archiving it in the best way, (3) displaying it in a most meaningful way, (4) thinking about the best ways users could interact together, (5) having fun doing it.

What is Talk Digger’s goal: finding, tracking and entering conversations evolving on the Internet.

When I am prototyping some of my ideas, most of the time the “final” prototype, the one that has some real potential, is not what I was thinking about when I started developing it. Most of the time it is something that evolved during my development. It evolved with new ideas I had while writing it, using it, contemplating it. This step was crucial, otherwise I would never had these ideas that make a first good idea, a final really good one (it is what I think and what I hope, however it is up to the users to confirm or not whether my final really good idea was in fact that good).

It is certain that when I will have finished these prototypes, when I will start developing the real system, that I will use all the techniques I know to make that application scalable: it is more than essential. However, I think that some developers, and many of their bosses, forget the importance of the creativity process in software development: how the first steps are so important to create an application that will reach the tipping point with users.

I hope that computer sciences degrees add an “art and creativity” course into their courses corpus.

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