By popular demand the grand mother diners are back! This time we will have an indian food buffet prepared by Pilar Dharamsey. She will prepare a buffet of Samosas, Chicken roast, Rayta, Corn Capsicum, Basmatti Rice, Palak, Chapati, and much more for you to enjoy. I’ll be there, join me next monday in Geneva!

The practical informations

When: Monday, December 17 from 18h30, food served between 19h30 and 20h30

Where: Le cheval blanc, 15 place d’armes, Carouge, 022 3436161.

Format: Buffet, flat price for food. The drinks are on and up to you. You sit wherever you want.

Map: here

How much: 35CHF, drinks not included. We will propose you a selection of wines and soft drinks to accompany your meal.

CAUTION: Booking is MAN-DA-TO-RY and we have a very limited number of seats!

Tel. 022 3436161 or email info@lechevalblanc.ch

I moderated a session at Leweb3 this morning, and had a blast creating conversation between Jaewoong Lee (Daum, Lycos), Dan Rose (Facebook), Michel Jaccard (BCCC) and Chris Alden (Six Apart) on “the dark side” of web 2.0. Behind this catchy title was a will to discuss the issues these new tools are creating in society, and talk about how the big guys are handling them.

We discussed three topics: Identity and online discussion, Privacy and advertising, and User generated content before taking questions from the public.

Identity and online discussion

• Many things are at the same level of our casual conversations in places like bars or between friends
• Increased identity did increase the “quality” of the conversation.
• Reputation a key factor also
• Online discussion is basically a reflection of human conversation, with the good and the bad appearing in the online world.
• Facebook did not see a big change after opening up their community to the public (the system was at first reserved for students of prestigious schools)
• In Korea, government installed a centralized identity system which did nothing to solve the problem of online bullying because of strong privacy issues and identity theft.
• Users are responsible for what they say and can be prosecuted for it, but usually it’s the one hosting in the content who gets the trouble because it is easier to attack them.

Privacy and advertising

• There is a tension between the need to know information about users (to advertise to them effectively) and respect of privacy. Big debate these days over the Beacon initiative.
• Dan Rose: we did two mistakes handling Beacon. We did not listen to our users, and didn’t communicate well what it was about. Now the system respects users needs and privacy.
• Future of advertising is certainly in social networks where I can recommend products to my friends. I noted that Facebook and Six Apart are basically taking us back to the Tupperware model, where after becoming micro-publishers we now all become micro-advertisers, advocating products to our friends.
• Users should be able to opt-in advertising, not be forced to opt-out.

User generated content

• Me: “90% of user generated is crap, but 99% of what’s on TV is crap. So is Internet content better?”
• Jaewoong Lee: user generated content is crap, but it is not the right way to look at it. Content is always relevant to someone.
• Web 2.0 did not lower the quality of information
• Facebook has no spam (in the traditional sense of the world, after the panel I got comments about how Facebook created social spam, where I get tons of updates on things I don’t care about), this is becauseyou only get information from people you trust.

The LIFT Think family continues to grow: after Marc Laperouza, the Near Future Laboratory and John Staehli, Jean-Henri Morin joins the ranks of the LIFT authors. A Swiss and French national, Jean-Henry is based in Seoul where he is associate professor in information systems (MIS) at Korea University Business School since 2006. He is specializing in Digital Policy Management (DPM), a hot and important emerging issue for the digital world.

Read Jean-Henry’s first post here: Do we need to take a step back and rethink IT research ? Services Sciences may be part of the answer

What is moving. Me, the background, or both? Answer towards the end of this week’s LIFT08 video update ;)

The Journal of Adolescent Health studies the impact of media violence and comes up with bad news: exposure to such things is the second worse threat to youth after only lung cancer.

In summary, exposure to electronic media violence increases the risk of both children and adults behaving aggressively in the short-run and of children behaving aggressively in the long-run. It increases the risk significantly, and it increases it as much as many other factors that are considered public health threats. As with many other public health threats, not every child who is exposed to this threat will acquire the affliction of violent behavior, and many will acquire the affliction who are not exposed to the threat. However that does not diminish the need to address the threat.

The relative strength of known public health threats.

Link

Worrying if this gets confirmed by other studies.

Wonderful news to start your day: “according to Brad Taylor, a staff software engineer at Google: The number of spam attempts — that is, the number of junk messages sent out by spammers — is flat, and may even be declining for the first time in years“.

Gmail’s spam filter is really effective, and as more users move to that platform, sending spam becomes less and less effective. Great news. Google making Bill Gates predictions come true, how ironic is that ;) ?

By popular demand the grand mother diners are back (first diner here)! More details should come during the week, but here are a few quick facts:

Date: Monday, December 17!

Food: Indian! Curry, tandoori, etc..

Format: Buffet, flat price for food, drinks up to you

Seats: 70 total, 20 already booked! Save your seat, we had 50 persons mid July so mid December we should have 200 requests. Tel. 022 343 61 61 or email info@lechevalblanc.ch

Where: Le cheval blanc, 15 place d’armes, Carouge. Map here.

Heard yesterday in a conversation with a friend whose organization works closely with Google:

“It takes one millisecond to get an answer from Google Search, but two weeks to get one from Google corporate.”

Google is becoming a big, big company, and a lot of people get frustrated when working with them. It will be interesting to see how Google’s bright and creative folks will answer that.

If you are a Swiss citizen you need to act against a dangerous law giving abusive rights to the copyright economy, limiting freedom to create and share in the process. The copyright economy is dead, political powers simply need our help to understand it, and the Swiss political makes it possible with 50′000 signatures.

Sign the petition here.

This post has very little interest if you don’t use Gmail

If I had a friend who was a project manager at Google, here are a few ideas I would give him to enhance the tool I use the most in my daily life: Gmail. All these considerations should be taken with one thing in mind: there are two big religions in Gmail world, the “archivers” and the “friends of chaos”:

- “Archivers” read messages and archive them to take them out of their sight as soon as they are treated. Their inbox is their todo list, and their goal is to have zero message in their inbox before they go for the week-end.

- “Friends of chaos” never archive any message, and usually have thousands of unread items because they don’t open messages that don’t interest them. Needless to say, archivers think that FOC are messy and irresponsible and FOC think that Archivers are dangerously maniac ;)

I am a member of the Archivers tribe, and my remarks should by taken with that usage pattern in mind.

ARCHIVE AND READ NEXT BUTTON
This becomes increasingly needed as I start using the mobile version more and more. On the mobile version there is no next or previous message link, so we really need something as Yahoo mail had a few years ago: an archive message and move to the next one in a click. That would really speed up the “morning scan”, when you go through all your messages to see which ones you can archive and which ones will demand more attention.

SEND & FOLLOW
The way I work goes like this:
- gmail is my todo list
- I have macro tasks (like “organize LIFT08″ or “write article”) I keep on paper
- I have micro tasks like “organize LIFT08 badges” or “invite speaker XX” which, 99% of the time, I execute by email.
- I have follow ups, things that left my micro tasks list because I treated them on my side (badges order or invitation email sent) and should happen if everything goes well. To not lose track of all these things I need to maintain a separate list that gmail could easily handle for me via a “send & follow” button. All outgoing messages would for example be labeled “to follow” and listed in a special page. As soon as I get an answer the label would be removed, and this list would be super useful page with all things that have left my todo but still haven’t been treated.

MESSAGE ORDER
The way my messages are displayed by Gmail has a huge impact on the order of treatment. Messages on top of the screen get most of my attention, even if usually the ones at the bottom are more important and well, more late. There is a conflict that needs to be resolved here, between the importance of messages and their freshness. If I have 5 important messages I need to manage, and a new message comes up from a friend who sends a bad email joke, I can’t resist but click on the message simply because it shows up on top and as unread. Because it is a new message it becomes the most important message, which is not good. The older a message is, the more urgent it is to treat it.

There should be a way to reorder messages in a better way than the actual “what’s new is on top” view. Let’s consider potential factors:
- age of the message (the older the message gets, the more urgent it becomes to treat it). We actually need the opposite view, with old messages on top and new in the bottom.
- frequency of exchanges with sender. Is the message coming from a coworker I email 15 times a day, or from my mother who pings me once every month?
- speed of answer. If I usually answer to a persons email in less than 10 minutes then his emails should be on the top of my todo list.
- meta data of the message, like labels the message has, its length (short message can be treated very quickly, let’s take them first to get them out of the way), its position in the conversation, etc..

All these factors should be taken into account, and have more influence on the presentation of messages. An idea: why not change the width of the line displaying the message summary to signify it’s importance?

INFORMATION FLOW
I don’t use google reader for a stupid reason: I don’t want to mark each post as read as I scan through way too many. So I use bloglines (yes I know it’s very very old school), and therefore my RSS and email are separated. But I need a view that embeds my two main information sources together. And here is an idea based on a condition: create the best flow of information, interrupting me as little as possible while allowing me to manage new items as they come in.

Step 1: merge RSS feeds and email

When a new email comes in, it appears on the top of the screen in my stack of items that I have to read.

Using a color fading technique, the new email appears in red then becomes an item like others as I move up in my reading.

When I reach the email, it appears just like any other piece of content. I can perform all actions on it (archive, reply, etc..)

What appears on my screen would be the result of a complex stacking process, where the system consistently reorders the upcoming items that are not on my screen using a number of parameters (date of post for RSS, importance of sender, urgency level, message is a reply to one of my message for email) and feeds them into the interface.

With such a concept, novelty does NOT equal interruption, and that would be a huge production boost, allowing me to stay in an information flow, not having to switch between applications (I have all my information in one place) nor being interrupted by new items.

NEW EMAIL DETAILS
A minor point that can still have a positive effect on productivity. The scenario is the following: empty indox, no new messages. I am composing a new email. Suddenly the Inbox link turns bold as I got a new message. This teases me into leaving my writing flow and click on the message to see what it is. Most of the time it could wait, but it’s tempting to see what it is. Why not give me more details about this email so that I can make a decision on whether I want to read it or not? A simple one liner on top of the screen saying: “new message from XXX, subject YYY” disappearing after a few seconds, allowing me to make my decision, and not creating that frustration of not knowing what that new message is about.

AND A FEW MORE THINGS
But these ones I am sure Google is already planning to release them soon:
- we need an offline version using Google Gears. The new interface already has a few offline mechanism (you can switch between messages and inbox view for example) but we need more!
- unlimited storage
- a “search message by size”.
- etc etc…