Amazon sold more e-books than paper books:

Amazon noted that on Christmas Day, for the first time ever, Amazon customers bought more Kindle books than physical books. The company didn’t offer specific numbers for either category.

Link

This should be taken with a pinch of salt, as the Kindle was the most gifted item of the year, and all the owners fired up their device to promptly order books. So this is clearly an abherration, but still an interesting milestone. Coming after the recent news that online advertising surpassed TV in the UK:

Link

The e-somethings are finally coming into their own, fulfilling the promises made back in the 90s. Took some 20 years but we are getting there.

Great interview (in French, my English translation below) of Umberto Eco about books, the internet, innovation and knowledge:

Ce qui forme une culture n’est pas la conservation mais le filtrage. Il y a du hasard dans la façon dont les oeuvres sont parvenues jusqu’à nous. Nous ne saurons jamais si, parmi les quatre mille rouleaux qui ont brûlé dans la bibliothèque d’Alexandrie à l’Antiquité, ne se trouvait pas un chef-d’oeuvre de l’humanité plus immense qu’Homère. […] Notre culture est ainsi le produit de ce qui a survécu à des filtres plus ou moins hasardeux, incendies volontaires ou non, censures, ratés, pertes… […] Et Internet est le scandale d’une mémoire sans filtrage, où l’on ne distingue plus l’erreur de la vérité. Au final, cela produit aussi un effacement de la mémoire.

Il existe une sorte de Larousse encyclopédique admis par tout le monde, même si celui d’un homme de 70 ans est plus fourni que celui d’un jeune de 25 ans. Internet peut signifier à terme la mise en miettes de ce Larousse commun au profit de six milliards d’encyclopédies, chaque individu se construisant la sienne, chacun pouvant à loisir préférer Ptolémée à Copernic, le récit de la Genèse à l’évolution des espèces. Nous courons le risque d’une incommunicabilité complète, l’impossibilité d’un savoir universel…

[[What created culture is not conservation but filtering. There’s randomness in how the works have reached us. We will never know if, among the four thousand scrolls burned in the library of Alexandria in ancient times was not a masterpiece of humanity greater than Homer. […] Our culture is thus the product of what has survived filters more or less hasardous, censorship, failures, losses … […] And the Internet is the scandal of a memory without filtering, where we can no longer distinguish the truth from error. Finally, it also produces an erasure of memory.

There is a kind of encyclopedia accepted by everyone, even if a man of 70 years knows more than a 25 year old. Internet could mean the eventual demise of the common encyclopedia, replaced by six billion encyclopedias, each individual constructing his own, each of which may prefer leisure to Ptolemy to Copernicus, the story of Genesis to the evolution of species. We run the risk of an inability to communicate, the impossibility of a universal knowledge]

Link

It’s a vast question: is the internet helping standardize knowledge (and therefore unifying it), or is it tearing us all apart into our own encyclopedias? Will society accept that, even if archiving everything is technically possible, it is neither wishable nor something mandatory to the creation of a culture?

I have been offered the chance to send an attention grant on WorldChanging, a nice initiative by Alex Steffen and his team centered around attention philanthropy. “In a noisy world, deluged in advertising, overrun with PR flacks and crowded with the superficial, one of the biggest barriers to success for a small, good idea or noble enterprise can simply be getting noticed in the first place.“

I decided to spotlight the work of Baba Wamé, who is working in Cameroon to raise awareness on the dangers of online dating for the women of his country.

Baba Wamé: Award-Winning Work to End Human Trafficking

WorldChanging Team
July 6, 2009 7:35 AM

Nominated by Laurent Haug.

I can say I have seen my share of great ideas and people in the past four years, with close to 200 speakers attending Lift. One guy stands out when I think of someone I want to send a bit of spotlight to: Baba Wamé.

I found him when I stumbled on his thesis on the impact of dating websites on Camerounese society. He is from a country where men pile up on boats to escape –- with the tragic consequences we know –- while some women, supported and encouraged by their families, use the Internet as a way to find a husband, leave the country, and support their loved ones through money transfers.

In the cynical world we live in, such an access to young and desperate women did not remain unexploited for long, and only 15 percent of women form a real marriage. The rest end up being prostituted, their passport in the hands of a random pimp.

Our western tools have an impact beyond our borders, not always positive. Baba helps us understand that, and is now setting up –- in part thanks to a grant he won at Lift –- an association to inform women in his country of the dangers of online dating. Visit his website to learn more.

Wamé’s Lift09 talk in English

Link

The videos of Picnic panel I moderated back in September is now online. An interesting discussion with several entrepreneurs who are reinventing the way their respective media (movies, music, writing, etc) works.

The pre-discussion presentations, and other Picnic talks, are all available here.

Want to attend this event? Leave a comment below or email me and I will send you one of the 10 Lift invites!

Aside from Lift, we are helping an increasing number of conferences to build their program and event, by advising them on the format, finding relevant speakers, and moderating the discussions. For the second year Lift is involved in the Transformeurs event, a one day conference on the internet of things.

This year Jean-Louis Fréchin (ENSCI), David Orban (Open Spime) and Daniel Kaplan (FING) are among the speakers, with great workshops and start ups presentations also scheduled.

^{Jean-Louis Fréchin’s latest project: Wablog}

The event is free for last year’s attendees and students, and costs 150chf otherwise. More info on technoark.ch

“People’s Star” Jin-Sil Choi has been found dead in her Seoul house, after apparently losing face over rumors circulating on and offline. She was known to specially care about internet comments about her, often spending hours reading thousands of them.

This tragic incident exposes the failure of the recent identity system that the government put in place last year following a rash of suicides among anonymous and famous citizens.

The KCC [Korean Communication Commission] admits that the identity verification system has so far had a limited impact on curbing cyber bullying since its introduction in July last year, saying that the number of “malicious” messages reduced by only about 2 percent. 

Link

Chang Kim - who sold his company to Google while he was on stage at Lift Asia (video coming soon, congrats Chang :) -  tries to come up with a better solution, proposing the creation of social black/white lists.

 If one of the defining characteristics of the Web 2.0 is socialness, why don’t we look at this problem through the lens of “social” as well? I think we should introduce what I call a “social whitelist” and “social blacklist.” (Hey, it’s the term that’s racist, not me.)

From our online relationship, we all interact with other identities, and there are some identities we know can be trusted. These good ID’s have been there for some time, with proven track record, and most of them have their own websites where they put their reputation and content on. Also, if I can trust this ID, I could perhaps also trust other ID’s that are being trusted by this particular ID. Now, if we can somehow aggregate and track these social trusts among online ID’s, we could perhaps have a society-wide online trust system sooner or later.

Link

My opinion is that technology can only go that far when it comes to solve this problem. There are no (should I say “less”?) suicides over Internet comments in Europe and the US because our culture puts less importance in losing face. Max Mosley or the Star Wars Kid are living proofs that, as the French put it, “ridiculous doesn’t kill”.

Interesting usage of Google earth in England, where “teenagers” spot cool pools using the freely available satellite pictures and coordinate uninvited swimming sessions. Pool owners have been on high alert and the police is trying to contact Google about adding a sure-to-change-everything sign warning that “using someone else’s pool is trespassing and therefore illegal”.

Teens begin by surfing Google Earth’s satellite images to find houses with swimming pools — or at least paddling pools. Once a target has been identified, sweaty swimmers then use Facebook to arrange an organised, but uninvited, pool-crash. […]

Owners of several plush poolside properties have already returned home to find teenagers taking a dip in their man-made lakes or their spoor: beer cans, dog-ends and vomit floating atop their once crystal-clear pools.

Link

Who saw that coming, the internet turning pools into a commong good :D

I have been interviewed by Germany based think tank Trendbuero - organizers of the Trend Days - on digital identity, social advertising and privacy. I hope this time my concept of tupperware economy will be picked up by bloggers ;) I think it’s a nicely ironic summary of what Facebook and the other social networks are trying to achieve. Technology takes us back to the basics almost all the time. Different means, same results.

[…] Identity is increasingly becoming digital, and is therefore managed not only by ourselves but also by others. Are we losing control of who we are?

I am not sure we lost more control. I wonder if it is not simply that we now have more feedback than before. Take a village a 100 years ago. Everybody had an opinion on everybody. One could go to a person in the street and ask “what do you think about him or her?” and get tons of information. Before new technologies, we had very little possibility to know what others were thinking about us. Now we have Facebook compare, hot or not, comments, ratings, we suddenly feel like we are losing control. I wonder if it isn’t simply an old process that has scaled to the global level. And that’s why it suddenly looks out of control.

Link (german version here)

In the next two weeks I will be speaking at three conferences, two in Lausanne (both in French) and one in Torino.

• Opportunités, risques et limites des réseaux sociaux en ligne dans le Web 2.0

Wednesday 5 March, 19-21h
Hotel Alpha-Palmiers, rue du petit chêne, Lausanne
Registration: free but mandatory on alumnis.mbahec@bluewin.ch

Panelists:
Sandrine Szabo (Swiss Web2.0), Marc Goehring (Electron libre), myself, and Michel Jaccard (BCCC), moderated by Jean-Olivier Pain.

• Le web, source d’information fiable ou outil de désinformation?

Wednesday 12 March, 18h
University of Lausanne, Amphimax, auditoire Erna Hamburger.

I will talk about the internet’s impact on democracy, censorship and free discussion with Olivier Glassey and Stephane Koch. Check the the lovely and not exaggerated at all illustration that comes with the event’s flyers :)

• Share Festival Pecha Kucha night

Friday 14 March, 16h
Salone d’Onore, Castello del Valentino, Viale Matteoli 39 in Torino

I will assist Share’s guest curator - a certain Bruce Sterling - during the Share Festival Pecha Kucha night. I don’t really know what to expect but it sure will be a lot of fun to attend and be around Bruce and Jasmina. Pecha-Kucha Night is a meeting where architects, artists, interior designers, art editors, video artists, fashion designers, photographers, free-lance journalists, students and anyone making part of the creative industry present a work, a project an idea in public. The peculiarity of Pecha Kucha is the way the participants will be presented: “20×20 format”. 12-14 participants will be presented every night and everyone will show 20 images, 20 seconds per each image, for about 7 minutes in total.

Our Leweb3 panel is now available in video on vpod.tv (video, transcript).

See also Janus Friis, Doc Searls, Yossi Vardi, and much more here.