From Paris to Oxford

My time in Paris was kind of a blur.

But it was a great chance to see some European colleagues and friends that I rarely see in the States, and far more fun than I generally have on the average Monday and Tuesday. (Well, actually, my Tuesdays are generally at Berkman and are usually pretty fun…)

Martin Varsavsky held a small afterparty on Tuesday night, which gave me a great chance to meet smart folks like Salim Ismail from PubSub. I’m looking forward to cornering Salim in New York sometime soon and learning more about how PubSub is trying to track conversations in the blogosphere as the site provides a very different view than I get from Technorati and Blogpulse.

And we got to watch Hugh Macleod hold court, accepting a stack of business cards from the room and churning out a stream of new cartoons, highly customized for their recipients. If I recall correctly, the first one David Sifry received had the text, “Ask me what my business model is and I kill you.” Mine follows below. (The text, if you can’t make it out: “when I grow up I want to write Geek Porn!”)

Yesterday involved waking up in Paris, some meetings in London, and ending up in Oxford, where I am today, at a joint meeting for the Berkman Center and the Oxford Internet Institute. It’s a conversation about the Internet and politics, with a focus on Eastern Europe. It’s my first time at OII, a sister institution to the Berkman Center, and it’s an almost spooky doppleganger of our home base at Harvard.

Tonight we head back to London for a day on the Internet and human rights (Friday), and then the long-awaited Global Voices meeting on Saturday. And a few radio and TV interviews and business dinners thrown in.

I’m sleeping all the way home on Sunday…