The zh.phpug.ch meeting has been renamed to webtuesday. So we got a general Web tech gathering in Zürich now. We will meet in the namics office on May 16, at 19:30. Urban Müller (search.ch techie) and Jürg Stuker (namics CEO) will talk about load balancing and clustering. Apparently search.ch and local.ch will serve as case studies. See you there!

On Monday I officially started my new job at local.ch, the search engine for every village in Switzerland. We currently offer access to the phone book but will add other services in the future. I’ll keep you posted of course! There is also the local.ch Team Blog where I’ll contribute to. I’ll mainly be working in system administration (we run a small server farm mainly on Linux) and programming (starting with PHP frontend work). I’ll also be responsible for the community part of local.ch. We have a few ideas about contributing back to the Swiss blogosphere and that will be my job. Thanks to the local.ch team for the great reception. I’m very excited to work on this project, especially knowing it since its first days. ...

Yesterday was my first day at local.ch. Two full days of meetings to boot.

The results are coming just about now. I won’t blog them as they’ll certainly be made available on the official site by other people. I guess I’m finishing my reporting now as my battery won’t stand much more time with me today. I liked the event because I was able to talk to some people I have long known online before (Chregu for example). Now I also know them personally. And I was able to meet some old contacts. ...

The votations at the Swiss Blog Awards are now going to be held. Two Virus moderators are moderating. bloggrrr was introduced and is disappointing. Or Leu has to explain it better to me. It’s really not more than evaluating which weblog is the most popular one.

The second and last panel discussion is currently taking place. Bruno Giussani, Jean-Christophe Liechti, Julika Hartmann and Martin Haslebacher talk about blogs as a media and media with blogs. Martin Haslebacher considers blogs as an important part in today’s life. He talked about how they can also serve as sources but they will want a second source to confirm the weblog. I assume that’s the standard approach with any source in journalism. Also they want to use (existing) blogs in their area to enrich the escpace platform as an additional value for their readers. Bruno Giussani asked if the person was a blogger who filmed the waves of the Tsunami in Asia arriving at the coast and sent that movie to the media. Julika Hartmann countered that she might define him as a blogger if he’d do that regularly. Nick Lüthi, the moderator of the discussion, asked Martin Haslebacher what their business model was about adding blogging to their services. They currently don’t have a business model but their existing business model is under pressure by new media. An example he used was craigslist. Martin Haslebacher said, that they’d have to develop some model to pay bloggers for their contributions. They don’t seem to have anything finished yet, but they are aware of the issue. I tried very hard to understand the French contributions by Bruno Giussani and Jean-Christophe Liechti. To same extent I succeeded but it was hard and I definitely have to learn French again. I lost it by learning Spanish in Peru. Lots of photographers. And the room is really too dark. ...

So I did make it after all to the blog awards. When I saw what time I’ll get back and how much a ticket costs (I’ll only have my GA starting Monday) I thought twice about it. But in the end, I made it here. Currently Roger Fischer, Christian Stocker and Hannes Gassert are talking about earning money with blogs. For Bitflux it’s not a priority to earn money with freeflux.net but it’s more thought of as a promotional tool. For Mediagonal it’s something that they do for customers if necessary or possible. Kaywa is the only of the companies here, that really wants to earn money from weblogs. That’s also why they focus on media companies somewhat. If you want to meet me here, I’m that guy. ...

Beim Bahnhof St.Gallen

Thanks to a private WLAN we're able to share files.

Joseph Deiss steps down as a cabinet minister. There are seven of these ministers and they are the executive power of Switzerland. Personally I have just about no feelings for Deiss, neither good nor bad ones. He just isn’t the colorful politician. That doesn’t mean that his work is bad, actually it probably means that he has done a good job. It will be interesting to see who will succeed Deiss. There will certainly be daily news stories about that topic. Currently people seem to talk about Doris Leuthard a lot. She is the president of Deiss’ party, the Christian Democratic People’s Party. ...