Bref, si vous avez une entreprise ou si vous pensez en démarrer une, je vous invite à visiter mon nouveau site, DenisCanuel.com

Je vais continuer à écrire des articles sur le démarrage d’entreprise et la technologie sur ce blogue, en anglais.

Merci à tous les lecteurs!

I’ve had cats in the past when I was younger but she was very different. She was very close to us and I always believed that she could understand us and feel our emotions – almost like a dog.

For the last month or so, she seemed to sleep all day. We knew she was weak. Then, on the day before I had to fly to attend a conference in the US, she had a very bad attack and collapsed. I thought she would die but she survived and was not in pain so we decided to keep her with us for a little bit longer before considering putting her to sleep. Before I left, I told her to wait for me, that I would return shortly. So I left for 4 days.

During my trip, her condition was pretty stable so I was relieved. I got home the day before yesterday at around 3AM and noticed that she was sleeping where I would normally sleep. She purred as she saw me.  I petted her before going to bed.

She passed away just 6 hours later.

She will be remembered…

Of course, this is a totally free service to benefit the community! :) Just visit the advertising page for more details.

The winner will also have bragging rights of having created the logo for one of the top international just a plain old blog from Montreal. I’ll also thrown in a free link back if desired! Woot!

Graphic designers and Wordpress design guru’s are equaly welcomed! Email me for details.

1. Wordpress – Twitter merger

Ah ha! Yes I know there are many widgets for Twitter but what I want has to be chronological and form one whole myoma. It should blend in with the other articles (instead of being lost in a sidebar, along with ads – where no one looks anyways) and be included in the RSS feed as well. Facebook has something pretty close where you can see which groups you joined, set your mood and so on. I don’t really care about moods but perhaps there’s a market for it (teens?).

2. Better MyBlogLog integration (aka turn all blogs in a big social network)

Allow to post using MyBlogLog’s user account and when possible, put a picture of the user who posted next to his comment thus encouraging users to visit each other’s blogs. Perhaps an expandable “last 5 comments” wherever the posts were made would allow users to find out even more blogs although I see some privacy issues here… Perhaps you guys don’t really want to know that I also post comments on a Coconut fetish blog. I also find it very hard to find good blogs so I tend to visit blogs of people who post but this could be automated somehow. MyBlogLog adds blogs you visit often but from memory, and other that “what’s hot”, it doesn’t suggest anything based on your preferences/behaviour..? Last thought: Facebook allows you to have a blog, so why not turn all blogs in a Facebook killer? Maybe OpenID could help solve this although it’s not a planned feature as far as I know…

3. Rateable comments

Not your everyday Slashdot/Digg style comments though. I want the top 5 comments to make it the front page AND the RSS feed. That way, you might get hooked on the great comments and read the whole article and the rest of the comments. I think everything in live should be “rateable” as no one likes to read crap and sometimes comments are more interesting than the actual article. So an article could get a rating/activity boost because of the quality of the comments. I often scan blog articles in my RSS reader and I’m sure I miss out a lot of great views/ideas/etc. Using a Digg icon just doesn’t work (unless you want to be featured on Digg) as the number of comments is not always an indication of the quality.

How about you guys? What would make your life easier?

This made me think seriously about the implications of having a copyright on my site. My vision when I started this blog was to help people like me who basically had no where to turn to and to help the community grow. Sounds good and fair, no?

Quick parenthesis, I’m a fervent defender of free information. Information wants to be free. Information IS free. I’m also totally against software patents, which is basically information processed in a particular way. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the implications of having a copyright while some of the information on my blog is “crowdsourced”. What about comments left by users? Can I claim these as “mine”? I don’t think so. I don’t want to anyway. Is this even enforceable if I wanted to?

Copyright issue is hard and I was actually looking into different licenses for my social news startup (for obvious reasons). However, for reasons that I cannot discuss now, I couldn’t find a license that protected the users the way I wanted to while being inline with the business model that I had in mind. What I need is a mixture of Copyright, Creative Commons and a license between two entities. Information wants to be free but no one likes it when it’s stolen away from you.

Back to my blog, I decided to remove the copyright and to use the Creative Commons “Attribution Share Alike” license. It gives flexibility to the community by allowing everyone to re-use information on this blog.

So if you haven’t really thought about it, I suggest you think about it for a second and rethink the way you control your information. Thanks Sylvain for noticing this!