As usual you guys put us on top of Flickr's hot tags in the last 24 hours, and the number of mentions we get in blogs across the world is equally impressive.

Coverage continues all over the blogosphere and on the community blog.

It is Friday morning and LIFT has one more day and night to go according to the plans. I just woke up at one of the nicest addresses in town in a flat where one can easily get lost and am all happy that on my third year attending this conference I finally made it to the fondue. I do not eat cheese fondue and went yesterday for the company. I sat across Nada and next to Francesca at the end of one of the tables, engaged in fun discussions and then left much too early so as to not arrive at my host's residence too terribly late.
I like this year's format. So far every year the format has been different, and I have no expectation in the world that the experimentation with the format will ever slow down. Humans love to play and tweak things, nothing is ever perfect and we are always drawing from utopia. As resistant as we all are to change, we love it! It is like having a natural schizophrenia that amounts to seeking the safety of the known while desiring the excitement of the new.
My experience of LIFT this year so far has been a lot more relaxed than in the previous years. There are many reasons for it, one being that this is a community that is starting to mature and where the relationships are beginning to rest on firmer ground. Other reasons are more personal and hang around my own decisions as to how to be present here this year. I like what I observe about the dynamics of community around this conference.

Marco created a FAQ page where frequent questions are answered. One key thing was to explain better the rules of the community blog, so here is the corresponding excerpt:

What is the LIFT Community blog ?
Every LIFT community member gets a personal blog. The LIFT Community blog aggregates all the posts published by community members into one single RSS feed. Subscribe to this feed to get the pulse of the LIFT Community

What should I post to the LIFT Community blog ?
You can freely write on the LIFT Community blog to tell the community about an idea or person you found interesting, point to an article you wrote, or tell us about an event we shouldn't miss. This is your space, feel free to use it! Please do not post commercial information, as this probably won't interest the community and may backfire.

How can I contribute to the LIFT Community blog ?
To blog on the LIFT website, simply navigate to the Submit a blog entry page and fill up the form.

The LIFT community blog is going strong! Remember: it is YOUR space where you can post your ideas, pointers, projects, videos, presentations, whatever you think will interest others. This blog has 335 subscribers via RSS and is a great opportunity to get visibility for the things you care about.

Recent posts include:

Companies are so Last Century... by Chris Cook

I've been working in Scotland and Norway with the Nordic Enterprise Trust - backed by a little money from Innovation Norway - to develop new partnership-based "enterprise models" using this simple and infinitely flexible vehicle. eg there doesn't even need to be an ageement in writing between members.

Weekly column on China and technology by Marc Laperrouza

As you can guess, the iPhone is manufactured in China. But in fact, it is made by everybody else but Chinese companies…
About 17 Taiwanese companies - none a household name - provide parts ranging from the camera lens to the battery charger. Japanese companies are responsible for printed circuit boards and the lithium ion battery. Then, there îs the German touch screen, worth around USD 35, the Korean microprocessor chip - itself based on a British technology… In other words, while most components are produced in China, no wholly-owned Chinese company appears in the iPhone food chain. As a result, of the $280 manufacturing cost of each iPhone unit, less than 5% actually stays in China.

Identifying open & free wifi networks more easily by Pascal Magnenat

Have you ever struggled to find a real open & free wifi network while browsing the list of available networks displayed by your notebook or mobile phone?
To make things easier, I've though of one simple idea: to identify the open & free networks with a common sign. This sign will be added before the wifi SSID network name.
((o)) is the sign that has been chosen. Its "o" should evoke openness while the parenthesis are here to symbolize the waves and to distinguish the letter "o" from the other letters composing the SSID name. -> A given network could have the following name: "((o)) network_name".

"Communities dominate Brands" by Ahonen by Philippe Galland

I rode that book in 3 days, was written end of 2005 but still very up to date and usefull. Any people wanna have more information, feel free to contact me. I am building a web2.0 website and this book really helped me to see the trends that were going on.

Welcome! by Helge Staedtler

You might want to have a look at the SCOPE07-conference in november where I will give a short presentation together with Barbara Staib on space & communication in virtual environments.

View the LIFT community blog for more.

We have just completed the migration of the blogs, and slightly changed the way they work in the process. We have 2 different groups of contributors and 3 views. Here is the breakdown:

The big change is that the conference blog is now written by BOTH the organizers and the community. And for those who only want the official communications, we created another blog with only that.

Are you lost? Read liftconference.com/blog because everything is there. Do you get too much information? Refine your selection by going to either the community or the official blog.

PS: The old blog feed now contains both the official and the community posts.
The old flow feed contains the posts of the participants and therefore is unchanged.