The Society Of Anticipation - The Loss Of Spontaneity?

There was a very good comment this morning made on the French Radio France Inter. I like to hear this radio channel because of its very high quality content.

So the chronic - you can even listen to the French podcast - argues that iPads, iPhones, the need to consult feeds and Twitter all the time have to do with our desire to anticipate the future - at least the near one. They also link the 9/11 to the time this anticipation came to be a political decision, translating in lots of money being invested monitoring networks and all kind of monitoring data in almost real time to find out who is about to do harm. Notice that's also short before Minority Report came out. Also there is a similar trend going on in finance, and now other areas - medicine, police investigations, etc.

But one might argue also that this is no new fact, and also do to with the wide use of the Web, which allows such processes in the first time. Actually, people always wanted to know the future, that may be for winning wars or for getting the seeds planted at the right time.

One side effect of that, is that all this tech gears has quite some influence on people behaviors. It's harder to meet people spontaneously it seems to me. Many tell they're busy while they're actually probably checking out Facebook or playing online games (or blogging...). Friends used to just come by my apartment. People used to just meet at the local bar around the same time every week.

It seems to me that I meet less people that I used before I was on Facebook. I may be biased. But we should remember that personal relationships matters more than things happening online.

How local newspapers should answer to the digital era

My local newspaper, the "Schwäbisches Tagblatt" is one that I like and that provide unique content about my town and what's happening around me. I like to read it now & then. But I almost never buy it. Why?
- It's a pain to get the physical version. I have to stop by some local store just for that newspaper. I get early to work and often come late when many shops are closed - and I work in a different area where this newspaper is not available, so lunch break is not an option to get one.
- I don't want an subscription. I'll never get the time to read the paper version entirely every day - moreover, I want diversity. Sometimes I'll read the Stuttgart newspaper, sometimes Le Monde and sometimes Forbes. I have no will to pay for stuff I'll not use. Also, in Germany, you have to put your paper in a separate trash that gets emptied only once a month, so it's also too much paper for me to keep at home.

What would I like? The same as big newspaper are providing. A model where I can buy single issues as PDF, iPad app or HTML5 page without subscription for a price well under the paper one, because there's no printing, shipping etc. included.

The Tagblatt already has quite a good online presence. With top articles, movie theater schedules and so on. It's quite good and provides a lot of value already. Still I'd like to have access to the entire content, and pay for it. I'd be more than happy to pay for it given it offers me the needed flexibility - like do Forbes, Le Figaro, and many others (not Business Week though - they offer only subscription. Probably they can afford that now they're part of Bloomberg).


But it's too expensive for small newspapers! Well, yes, if everyone do its own solution for scratch. There are more than 300 regional newspapers in Germany only. They could all use a couple frameworks to deliver their information to widely used format, and also do the payment system together.
What do I care about the local information? I care about the information that's in, not the design. There are very defined sections that most newspapers need, and I don't buy the local newspaper because it's shiny and well designed. Adopting a format like Treesaver should provide enough quality to display the information a newspaper needs to publish.

Many local newspapers are slow to move, because they have the monopoly in their area. But this could be a hard landing for many of them, like this is has recently been in the United States. Our local information matters, and I'd like to keep it alive.

You need to try out technologies...

... To understand what their ups and downs are. Yet another example came to me recently. I was just reading my iPad on my couch, with the iPad on my legs - I didn't hold it at all. Why should I hold it?

So I remembered that discussion I had a few months ago with a colleague about the iPad before I bought it. He said: "that's a cool gear, but it weight quite a lot and must be tiresome to hold a long time, for things like reading". Of course, when you read a pocket book, you have to hold it. It's not a real problem because it's light, but one of the biggest reason you hold the book is to keep it open. But you don't need to keep the iPad open. So holding it is unnecessary. But who would have thought to that without trying?

A European Rating Agency?

There has been quite some discussion lately about the supremacy of the US rating agency, and why there should be a European rating agency to counter that. Many politicians over the EU even argued that this agency would rate less aggressively Greece and other countries with debt difficulties.

So let me try to get it straight... A European rating agency wouldn't do much for Greece and similar European countries, where it couldn't pretend the least independence. But it would have already downgraded the US.

This post is building on a tweet from a few days ago.

Cities should copy the High Line

Recently I came across a few articles related to the new High Line section opening. I already noted to see the High Lane next time I'll be in New York, so I had a look at these articles. Inhabitat has a great article, with video including an interview of the landscape designer. Also the press across the world reported that opening.

I find that very interesting, because... Who would think a refurbished railroad would provoke such much enthusiasm and curiosity across the world? Just because it's in New York? There are many parks in New York and no one mention them outside the city boundaries (Tompkins Square anyone?).

So there must be something else. One is that the design is really modern and ambitious, with very well designed paths, vegetation everywhere, places to socialize. Another one is that it is higher than the rest of the streets, giving a new view on the city - and New York is probably one of the very best places to make use of good perspectives!

Also it is not really a park - it is more a way, making de facto a pedestrian street in New York, which is definitely not common.























(image from Wikipedia)

So in many sights, the high lane is really innovative. So what if others could cities could take inspiration of that? In my town for example, there is a big debate about doing a stair between the river and an former hospital from the middle age, building a whole new path above the historical city wall. I think that is a wonderful idea, as it will create a whole new street in a town quarter that hasn't seen much new streets in the last 500 years.

Creating such attractions also makes people curious, and make them come there. It's not needed to say that many city centers need to attract people back. That won't happen without changing anything. By reusing the existing infrastructure and being creative with it, magic things happen.

Words Matter

As I visited my parents in France, it struck me again that my father asked me how he could do a "Powerpoint" with his Ubuntu system. I had to explain him that Open Office can also do presentation, that what he is actually wanting to do is a presentation. Sounds like an easy task, but it's not. Microsoft has won the vocabulary of the office software, and that is not going away soon, making life harder for competitors - even in 2011.

You'll probably argue that my father means actually he wants to do a Powerpoint - which would mean that not only he would like to create a presentation, but also use the exact same software he's used to. Could be, but I don't think that's the case. Actually he seemed pretty open to use another software. He actually likes to use Chrome, which is not a browser he was used to. But he only knew of a presentation as a "Powerpoint".

Let's accept it, we all use, at least sometimes, "word" or "excel" as common nouns. That makes a whole difference for web search, for example. You're unlikely to find Open Office if you search for powerpoint.

The vocabulary in itself is locking people into one brand, without any file mechanism involved yet! The question then becomes - what is the alternative wording to Word, Excel and Powerpoint? Well there isn't really one. At least not one so succinct. "word processor"? Too long. "Open Office Writer"? How can you put that in a discussion: "Can you give me your writer about the economic crisis?". "Spreadsheet" is appropriate in English but it doesn't translate well in German or French for instance ("Tabellenkalkulationprogramm" anyone?). So we've got a problem here.

Someone will have to find new, better words for that. The more common the words, the most chance it fits to some more open document format - because that's what it's all about. Find standardized nouns for standardized formats. But enough of that topic. Maybe the best names are already used by Microsoft, and we'll have to move further to a new paradigm. Would it be better pushing people to just make "web pages", wherever local or not? Facebook is using "messages" and "updates", and is actually almost owning "friends". Words matter.

Where are the feeds? (And why there is a lot of potential in RSS)

As you know, I'm using feeds a lot. And it's not new. In fact, my base sources of information are feeds. I like it because you can couples different sources in a single interface and presentation flavor. It may be linear like Google Reader or widget based like Netvibes, but you can also produce read-only pages like Dave Winer's River of News.

Many folks write RSS is dead. I don't believe it. Why then?

- RSS is an open protocol. At some point in time, people will see closed data (think Facebook) is as evil as DRM. With DRM, you could understand as soon as you had a new computer and couldn't transfer the music on it. When the first big social network will close down or have a big data loss, the masses will get it. And it'll be painful for many.

- Not enough Web pages are feed enabled. There are two use cases that have a huge potential for me. The first one is a feed of artists events. Maybe some event companies have them, but that would be great if I could just go on Beyoncé Web page and subscribe a feed of her concerts across the world. Justin Timberlake has such a feed, but it's far from standard. So Ping and MySpace are covering that use case partly, but damn I want to use my own feed reader for that! The second use case is companies intranets. If any internal resource had a feed, one could monitor much more stuff happening, and thus would be able to connect different news across the company, and so generate more ideas. Or find out what stuff is duplicate, understand what techs are growing etc. A separate post would be needed for that topic.

- Mashups are still in the early adopter stage, wait till they come to wide adoption. The mashups interfaces are not completely clear, still need a bunch of coding. Wide repository are still missing in the enterprise use-case. Netvibes and Google Homepage are the best examples I know of mashups applications, still they miss a lot of features, like connecting widgets with each other.

What can we do to fix that? Maybe kill the word "RSS" and just replace it with "feed", which is much more user friendly - in case we want the RSS tech to appeal to the masses. And implement new solution basing on the integration power of feeds, providing value for user that goes across just publishing titles from news sites.

This post is still a kind of a draft, "think aloud" article. Correct me if I'm wrong on some points. But give me your thoughts ;)

Gastartikel über Stuttgart 21

Von Dr. Nikolai Weber:

Seit über 60 Jahren haben wir in Deutschland eine parlamentarische Demokratie. Und wir haben damit sehr gut gelebt; nicht zuletzt, weil Entscheidungen verlässlich waren und nicht von der momentanen Stimungslage "auf der Straße" abhingen.

Die Entscheidung für eine parlamentarische Demokratie war auch kein Zufall, sondern sie wurde ganz bewusst getroffen, da gerade wir Deutschen wissen, wie kurzlebig und anfällig für Manipulationen die Meinung "der Straße" ist. Letzteres, also gezielte Manipulationen der Meinung "der Straße", erleben wir gerade durch die Gegner von S21.

Wenn nun aus purer Angst vor dem Ergebnis einer bevorstehenden Landtagswahl bewährte Grundsätze unserer Demokratie und damit die Verlässlichkeit politischen Handelns von einigen Politikern in Frage gestellt werden, gibt dies Anlass zu größter Sorge!

Bedenken sollten alle, die jetzt nach einem Volksentscheid rufen, daher vor allem, dass eine Öffnung unserer Demokratie für Volksentscheide auch noch ganz andere Entscheidungen ermöglichen könnte als die Frage, ob ein Bahnhof gebaut wird oder nicht. Insbesondere die Reaktion der Grünen wäre interessant, wenn es in Deutschland durch Volksentscheid - wie jüngst in der Schweiz - zu einem Minarettverbot käme.

Man mag zu S21 stehe wie man will. Aber es wäre mehr als töricht, wegen eines Bahnhofsprojekts bewährte Verfassungsgrundsätze einfach über Bord zu werfen! Mögliche wirtschaftliche Folgen werden in dem Artikel beschrieben. Mögliche politische Folgen mag man sich besser im Detail erst gar nicht ausdenken!

What I think Sony did wrong with the PSP and the PS3

I've been owning a PSP two years long, and I have a PS3 since last year (which I also use as low-maintenance, no-burden, not-expensive media center). These are both marvelous of technology, proving that Apple is not the only company doing good hardware. Actually, back in 2005, the PSP was a fantastic innovation that had so much potential. But unlike Apple with the iPhone, Sony did almost nothing with that. So this is here my opinion on what they did miss.

- They could have killed iTunes. Sony have content - they are music publishers and they own Columbia Pictures, not less. They have the hardware, the providers and, what Apple not even has, the content publishers. Also the PS3 is much better than the iPod Touch or the iPhone when it comes to viewing movies. So since some time, there is finally a small media store, which is not bad at all, but it all came too late when iTunes was already dominating the whole market. Too late, folks, and also too small.

- Where is the App Store? The PSP and PS3 firmwares are so capable, how hard could it be to add functionalities for third-party apps? Would there be a need for an iPod touch if one could install apps on a PS3? The interface of the PS3 has some advantages on the one of the iPod Touch, mostly for playing games.

- They aren't trying to "eat" the other hardware channels. For example, why is Remote Play only working with the PSP? I would like to access it from my iPhone. Instead I buy my content on iTunes then - which I can better expose back to my PS3, at least for the audio content. Now there is also the possibility to view movies on YouTube - but that isn't a competitive advantage because almost every other device also can.

Which is interesting here is to see that Sony have the perfect technology and content to change the game, but they didn't. Why? It seems like it is big corp culture at work: never question your business model, never do actions that could impact other departments. It seems like they are missing executives with a vision and an understanding of the culture of the 2000's. Somehow they seem still stuck in the 90's business model, but it has long disappeared.

All in all, it seems like Sony is pretty resistant to user advices and market pressure. They're already suffering, but they should rather change to survive at all. At least they're not lacking good engineers.

Are programmers problem solvers or just builders?

Again, it all began with a tweet. Well, almost.

A few days ago, I read some forum where someone described programmers as "problem solvers", and how you have to really like solving problems all the time to love programming. Some responses were a bit intimidated by that perspective. "Problems" all day long - bah!

To me, this sounds quite like a normal reaction. People want to do something positive in their life, particularly when this is about work - the most time consuming occupation one generally has. So I began thinking about that - Are programmers "problem solvers"? In my opinion, not really.

Of course I'm taking the "problem solving" in a very mathematical sense. Not everyone may agree with that definition, but that is how I understand it.

When I think about programming something, I'm not often doing that to solve a problem in the mathematician sense. I'm not searching for a solution. Instead, I'm rather working like an architect, putting together pieces to form a home. An architect is not "solving a problem" when he provides a house for a family but rather "fullfilling a need". I rather see programming as lego building. If you ask someone to build a lego house, some will do something very basic and ugly with a few bricks on non-matching colors and scales, and other will do a fantastic medieval castle. Same for programming. This is quite different of maths were the proof and result is, mainly, right or not. That doesn't mean that programming is more simplistic, rather that it is a producing task rather than it is a solving one. The solving part is actually more part of the computer science, and less of the programming, or software engineering.

There is another reason why I think that programmers, while they tend to like qualify themselves as problem solvers, are not so much such. If they were, wouldn't they enjoy fixing programming defects and debugging all day long? Of course most of us prefer writing code - that is, building something new, assembling, creating.

I also got a good comment on Twitter where someone asserted that programmers are also partly artists, and I think this is also true. Hackers program sometimes for political reasons. Some to produce new graphic effects. The creativity component should be integrated here.

So if you're beginning programming, and find this is some hard task - don't get discouraged, because this is actually an interesting and funny task that is rarely as frustrating as a hard math assignement!

JavaScript and cloud computing - the cost factor.

In these times of on-demand computing, with services like Amazon Web Services or Google App Engine, one could wonder why JavaScript gets a sudden regain in popularity. There are lots of reason to use JavaScript on cloud related projects. Besides the use of JSON, which is more readable and consumes less bandwidth than XML, and the fact that JavaScript toolkits are pretty nice to use as a developer, I'd like to pinpoint the cost advantage JavaScript can bring in the game.

With PHP or Java, you let your business logic runs on the server, letting the client download most of the HTML already prepared. The user browser then just has to download and render that data. It also means that your server has to produce all that stuff, including pretty CPU- and memory-expensive HTML and XML.

Now what can you do with JavaScript? JavaScript (JS) will allow you to serve a very simple, naked HTML page, which will also reference the JS code (you can separate it in small modules that will get loaded dynamically to save bandwidth). The client JS code will then ask for the raw data almost directly to the backend database - with a small security and data transformation layer in the front. This data should be produced in JSON to reduce the CPU usage on both server and client sides. With that data, the JS code will then be able to build the user interface dynamically, either by building markup dynamically or basing on HTML templates.

What does that mean for the billing costs? Basically, you can save CPU usage on the host - thus having less billed, and also you can save bandwidth either with code lighter than the generated HTML, or code that makes your page application-like and not website-like. Let's picture that this way: with JS you can make your site load the code only once, and after that it will only exchange light JSON data with the server. With a Java or PHP implementation, you'll have many pages downloads. So the gain with JS is higher when you intend your user to stay longer on the site.

It may not be the silver bullet though - feel free to comment that and show cases where server- generated markup is better. I miss detailed numbers to present as case analysis. What I was just trying to show is that JavaScript should play a role when you do a cost or performance optimization of your website, especially if it's hosted on dynamic billing environment.

Fantastic colour pictures

This site really deserves a post. This morning I've stumbled upon fantastic colour pictures from the beginning of the 20th century. Not only the pictures are beautiful to view, but some of them are a real interesting clue on big changes across the last century.

On a first look, the architectural changes: The picture showing the building which is now the famous Plaza Hotel in New York, with the south-east Central Park corner, presents such a completely different neighborhood than today, that I couldn't recognize it first. Everythings has gotten bigger in New York. Also look at this fantastic picture of the Eiffel Tower with the Trocadero being huge compared to the current one. It's gotten smaller in this part of Paris. Also look at these pictures from England with a falling roof, the same place that would live an housing bubble hundred years later.

You can spot some pretty big cultural changes also. Europeans were clothing very differently, most of that has been lost in between. But the most impressing pictures were the ones from the Iran and Iraq, where you can see how women are clothed in a modern way - if you compare the way women are clothed on these photos in Holland and Iraq, it almost gets incredible. It should remind us that cultural changes are not always getting forward.

Finally, some other photos are not quite so happy. War, destruction and death, that was just the beginning of the 20th century which was quite violent. It's important to have memories of that though, and colour pictures are the best way to remind us that all that was real and not so far away.

New layout, comments working again

Today I finally repaired the blog comment links by putting a new layout template. It was about time, after all. The new template is slicker, the fonts a bit bigger, and think in overall the whole gives more accent on the content than before. Have fun reading & commenting!

Comments not working

I'm sorry, I was told newly that comments are not working anymore. This will be corrected, but for now comments are not working. If you want to discuss with me about stuff published here, please feel free to contact me on Twitter.

Sentence-long paragraph: a new trend?

This morning I was again struck by that article from the CNN website. No, it wasn't about the topic. Rather the format. Look at this, there is a new paragraph for every sentence. I am somewhat use to read, a person you'll call a moderate reader. From what I learned in school, I use to make a break between two paragraph. A paragraph marks the end of a topic or an argumentation, and the break is here to mark that, and also let you a short time to digest the overall content. The second reason of a paragraph is to mark visually the different parts of a writing to allow a quicker navigation and overview of the content.

So look all these links. It's not an inadvertence, or a single editor messing with the editing rules. It's a trend. And quite worrying actually. The problem with these articles is you can't understand them. Why? Because if you're asked how many points the article made, or if it does have a these and anti-these, you won't know without rereading the whole article. This type of writing messes with your head, hiding the important information and flooding you with clusters of words without much structure. It probably won't make you wiser, because you'll find hard just to parse it.

So where does that comes from? I suppose it has some roots in micro-blogging. Of course that derives from the original sense of micro-blogging. I came to that idea because that comes at around the same time medias begin to integrate widely Twitter and Facebook in their publication model. But that may also be from texting. Maybe even some expert found out it was better to get the young crowd reading. Thoughts?

Facebook, privacy and information value

Now & then I see friends putting a false family name on their Facebook profile. While I respect that decision, I don't think it's really a productive idea. Maybe you can give me some hints I am missing.

My point in short:
Your family name isn't what's valuable to FB. What's valuable to them is what you write and who you connect with. If you don't want FB to spy you you shouldn't be here in the first place, because your data usage is what matters. By having all your communication, they know where you live, where you friends live, probably how old they are, what all of you are studying, who are you best friends,...

Place yourself as a car dealer. Does it really matters if your customer is named Smith or Johnson? Doesn't it matters more to know that he's a lawyer or that he's going to the Golf club? Now that may be some clue on how much he can invest on a car.

Well, you may fear that strangers try to sneak information about you that should stay in your friend circle, and you're probably right about that possibility. To protect yourself against such thinks, review carefully your privacy settings.

So if you fear Facebook spying on you or using your data, maybe you shouldn't go there at all - or at least reduce your usage to the minimum. And review your privacy settings, it can't hurt.

How I missed the Web2.0 in 2002

You'd think that Facebook is a simple idea, right? Write a web site for connecting friends together, and get billionaire. So simple!
...
Really?
I've got one glimpse at the difficulty of getting the right concept while writing such an app.
In 2001, at the university, a classmate and I had to do a project for a student counsellor. He wanted a Microsoft Access database application (yes, that was 2001!) for managing his student contacts. Basically he needed *lots* of information in his database - more than we could write in our first year of CS studies. So we wanted to save summaries of discussions with student, their school curriculum, their hobbies etc.
Well that was almost too much, we delivered a prototype with a pretty complex database model (as complex is when you're in the 1st year of CS). An implementation of core functionalities was done, but nothing that got really used.

For some reason I felt unfinished with this project and wanted to get it running so that it could be useful to someone. Also the idea of structuring lots of information about people really interested me, because these are usually very unstructured data.

So I wanted to continue that but I hated Access. In the meantime, I learned the existence of PHP and MySQL, and really liked the concept and the slickness compared to Access. I reused the over-complex model we had. A person could have many addresses, including parents, work, student dormitory etc. You could save the whole study & work curriculum of this person. All this was taking around 30 tables if I remember well.

So I spent one month in the summer learning about PHP & MySQL. It was a very good learning time, as I hadn't much else to do at that time, except learning German - I was planning somehow getting to make an internship or studying in Germany. So I built a few panels around the persons, there adresses and CV... And quickly realized the relations between the persons would be interesting to model and include into that DB. So I began to do that, included 10 test persons in the database, just to realize that... well, that is wasn't really valuable. It's nice but I could as well have taken a piece of paper and drawn the relations between these.

This is around this point that my other plans with Germany and summer job took me much more time - I just let that programming project before I even saw the value. Why wasn't I seeing it? I think one of the reasons was a "geek bias". I was more interested in scientific data (how many person are related to how many in average,...) that on providing my friends a fun tool. And most of all I was also not really seeing the value outside of my home computer, where I wrote this stuff. Had I thought to a public website... Well I didn't, end of the story.

When I heard of Facebook for the first time, I immediately thought of this website I wrote once. That gave me a good lesson about ideas and (not seeing) opportunities.

Dojo tip for debugging partly "undefined" widgets

Yesterday I stumbled upon a common Dojo problem: Dojo is refusing to create twice a widget ending with undefined (result looked like widgettype0undefined). I ended up searching a long time what code I could have forgotten, what variable could have been missing in inherited classes,... I asked colleagues and the few ones who knew Dojo had no standard explanation for that problem. "Hard to find", "Search the call stack". All that brought nothing. The Dojo "call stack" just stays on the dojo.js file... very helpful.

Well, it turns out this "call stack" thing was the base for the solution. Thinking about templates and static programming, I began searching by making a dijit.byId(xxxx0undefined) in the Firebug console. From there, the solution was to walk up the nodes in the DOM model, and the parents a few levels up showed me what was missing. Some elements didn't have a name - because I selected the wrong NLS file. Bummer.

Well, Dojo experts probably know that already, but I think many developers are in need of such tricks. Hope it helps...

Sommertraum

It's been a while since my last post... Anyway...
Today was an unusual day because it should have been boring. But on the way home, one train came late. I was very hot and uncomfortable in this train, and as it was late I lost the next connection. Time to read a few tweets, fine - but people were stacking in big numbers on the platform. I went to ask what was going on, and people told me the preceding trains were not driving. How well, then time for a break. No way I'd stack in an overheated train today.
I decided to go to the town center of Herrenberg and have a drink on a very nice place outside, under the trees and without cars. I used to occasion to continue "The Kings of New York", a splendid book that I'm enjoying so much, and that was it - 100% relaxed.
Well, it took me three hours to come home, but that was worth. Good evening!

My information system

So it's been a while that some friends asked me how I aggregate my information. So here I'm trying to explain how my system works. How do I keep everything in sync between work & personal information, and how do I keep up with tweets and all the information going around about new technologies? It's still a work in construction actually, but it sort of have to be so-news keep changing, and so do the channels where they're sent.

My system is built mostly around Netvibes. Netvibes is a tool that I didn't really understood well at the beginning. First time I saw it I was like "Huh - limited information in each widget, and not a fast to read as a linearised feed reader" (you know, these feed readers that look like Outlook - and yes, Google Reader is one of them too). Here is how Netvibes looks like when you begin using it:















Turns out the human brain is pretty good at parsing such boxes. And the visual position of the box in the layout helps to know immediately the category of the information.

So now it is how my Netvibes pages looks now:















I have LOTS of feeds in it. So it's separated though tabs, each one has a topic, except the one you're viewing that's my main screen. It's the one I'm 90% of the time in Netvibes.

• Let's begin with number 1. It's a Yahoo Pipe stream. It concentrates many feeds: News from CNN, LeMonde.fr, as well as my Twitter Rssfriends feed. It has many tech feeds integrated in it too (Mashable, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb). It allows me to follow numerous news sources in a single feed that is sorted per publication time. I've been using it for around two month, and so far I'm really satisfied. Soon I should do a review of the feeds in it, maybe add a few ones too.
• Number 2: My Twitter widget. Let me see updates, replies, direct messages and post content. At work I've performance problems with the input field, but this is the widget I use the most anyway. Thus the central position. Twitter is getting always more important to me because I have keep getting more critical contacts in it. Good friends, my career mentor @martinpacker... It's an invaluable source of information. Twitter is a strange tool. People almost always have a strong opinion about it. Most see they didn't get it till they tried it. Correct me if I'm wrong. I use Twitter for inspiration. It brings me new ideas, new contacts. And it works very good that way.
• Number 3: I've found recently Hacker News - it is a real good tech source. I has all kind of posts that appeal to tech guys like me. It's a little Paul Graham/YC biased, but not too much. Hacker News is something like Digg but it seems the great majority of people that post & vote there are smart people. Hence the value and the placement in my Netvibes frontpage.
• Number 4: My TODO list. To not forget that I have some work to do, too :) For a while I used the "Webnotes" widget at the central top as a todo list. For now I'm happy with this lightweight todo widget - the colour function is very nice.
• Number 5 is my Gmail main box. Nothing special to say, it is reliable!
• Number 6: I monitor the IBM Main newsgroup thought the feed available with Google Groups. But I close it when not working.

There are many things that I've not included in the screenshot. At the bottom of my main tab, I've the current Dilbert & XKCD too. A must!
The tab "Information" contains general news in three columns with newspaper feeds: a column for France news, one for US news & one for Germany.
In the "Tech" tab, I have heise.de, TechCrunch and other. Most are in my Yahoo pipes, but sometimes it's better looking at the single feeds. Well, let's just put a screenshot, it's worth 1000 words:















I use the tab "Bloc Notes" for writing diverse stuff I need to memorize. It's composed of a few Webnotes widgets that I arrange with my needs. Pretty dynamic & changing content.

Netvibes is really a cool tool - at the state of the art of the Web design. Usability is high, it looks good and the functionality is really useful. I can only advise you to give it a try!