The official coComment weblog

The coComment team have been at re:publica (re:publica) in Berlin this week.

What a great conference; lots of really thought provoking presentations, some highly entertaining ones and a lot of fun too.

We were here to, amongst other things, get some feedback on the coComment 2.0 Concept. Many thanks (und freundliche Grüsse) to everyone who attended our workshop and many thanks for the feedback. As mentioned during that session, we will be providing a beta test environment as we move closer to actually deploying coComment 2.0 and we are inviting people to volunteer as beta testers. Just a quick note on this one though, we are only going to be able to support a limited number of testers since otherwise we’ll overload our test environment.

I was also introduced to the wonders of PowerPoint Karaoke (Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur). This is one of the best, and funniest, things I’ve ever encountered. The concept is simple; randomly downloaded powerpoints on topics such as “Say ‘Yes’ to Dorsten” and, my selection, “History of European Bread Culture” are picked and you have to present to them in front of an audience and a judging panel in the style of Pop Idol/X Factor. As I was the only English speaking participant the judges were very kind to me. I haven’t laughed so loud in ages and the winner, Jan Schmidt, wowed us all with details of the oversize women’s show market on ebay ! Trust me, you had to be there.

And I won third prize ! I think it was favouritism towards the sole englishman but I am now the proud posessor of a comprehensive how-to guide to the internet. It will, I’m sure, fill in the many holes in my technical understanding of html/xml/php etc - once I learn enough German to actually read it.

So, once again, a big thank you to the organisers for having us and freundliche Grüsse to everyone at re:publica - particularly for your understanding of those of us with less than fluent German skills. It always embarasses me that, at an event in Germany, I can stand up and speak in English and be understood - I very much doubt that the converse would be possible in the UK.

Matt.

As some of you noticed, we have had a partial outage on April 3rd. This was not a total service interruption as many users were still able to access it. However, some were not able to connect to it (like me), or did get very slow response.

We are still investigating what happened, but I guess you understand this is a strange situation as the service was still up and running and some users still using it !

In order to prevent such an outage to slow down the access to an integrated blog or to a site using the blog boxes, we are making some changes in our client code and our service architecture. We will keep you posted when the update will be available.

Christophe