(French below)

A little more than a week to go. Let's look at what you are interested in.

OK, innovation comes out way ahead...
Then design, social media (aggregating social network, networks, networking and media), collaboration and ART!
Open the larger picture a take a look.

Larger picture / image plus grande

Un peu plus d'une semaine d'attente fébrile. A quoi vous intéressez-vous?

Evidemment, l'innovation est loin devant...
Ensuite le design, le social media (aggrégation de social network, networks, networking, media), la collaboration et l'ART!
Ouvrez l'image plus grande et jetez un coup d'oeil.

Lift is very participative, based in large part on participants suggestions and feedback. One of the main question we have is this: how can our community better exist between events? We have more and more conferences happening around the world (you will know why I am saying that during Lift09's closing speech ;) but what else could we do?

If you have some ideas for us, please attend the workshop organized by our community manager called What can we make of the Lift Community for the other 362 days? Join us, bring your bright ideas and make a difference in an incredible group of incredible people.

John Elbing, whom most of you know because he is our community manager, has created a tag cloud of the 2009 participants interests, the ones you can enter in your profile. Here is the result.

See the live version.

Live links for the tags to find interesting people: http://liftconference.com/person/lift-community

Jeffrey Huang, professor at the Media and Design Lab (Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne) addresses the merging of the digital and the physical in the context of near future cities. Through different projects he conducted, he exemplifies how interactive technologies can transform our physical environment to foster better communities.

Jeffrey Huang, professor at the Media and Design Lab (Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne) addresses the merging of the digital and the physical in the context of near future cities. Through different projects he conducted, he exemplifies how interactive technologies can transform our physical environment to foster better communities.

As you might have noticed we started to publish the speakers profiles, a tradition we started at Lift07 with the idea of allowing participants to preview the speakers they want to focus on during the conference.

This year the profiles will be published by Benedikt Foit and we added a little something new: participants profiles! We have amazing people coming to the conference, giving workshops, speaking at the open stage, or simply attending, and we decided to profile some of them. Lift veteran Tom Hume, who attended every edition since lift06, has the honor to go first, with more profiles coming at the pace of one every four to five days.

If you have an account on our website you will receive the first issue of our newsletter! After not really using email to keep in touch with our growing community, we decided to send a couple of updates every year, mostly to announce each event and keep you guys informed of the changes that we make to the format of the conference.

We hope you like this new way of passing information to you, and you can subscribe or unsubscribe on your account page, by clicking on the "My newsletters" tab.

Last but not least, our Google Group is now closed after a few years of great service!

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.