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.

Some articles spelled the end of email as early as 2004 (in Korea of course, where else). Now Slate comes back on this matter claiming that “email is looking obsolete“.

The main argument behind this reasoning? Stats show that teens are giving up on email in favor of instant messaging and social networks. As these kids will get older, email won’t be in their toolbox so they won’t use it right?

Isn’t there a problem here? Does this separation by age really make sense? It is because you are a teen you don’t use email, or is it because you don’t yet play in the corporate arena? I think it is the latter. Somehow usage is correlated to age (facts are here, teens don’t use email), but this does not mean this whole generation won’t start using email once it gets older and, well, needs a job, needs to climb a corporate ladder, has to sell products to clients.

It is not because the young generation does not use Viagra that Viagra won’t be used in the the future ;) If you listen to ethnographers like Stefana Broadbent, they tell you that email is the “admin channel“. And admin is one of the “pleasures” of stepping in the adult age, something that you don’t have to worry as a kid. As admin catches up with the new generation, it won’t be able to escape email.

If there is a real threat to email it is not SMS, IM and Facebook. It is JotSpot and the other wiki-based collaboration platforms who make the asynchronous and invasive email obsolete.

But good ol electronic mail has very strong allies in a few things like corporate politics (who wasn’t involved in a “cc war” with an escalating number of bosses copied on the messages), ego (how many people “didn’t notice” they hit reply to all instead of reply when making a “brilliant” joke in a chain mail), bosses processing power (I don’t see a CEO with 50 chat sessions open, taking a large number of decisions at the same time) to only name a few.

Consumers are pushing the creative industries towards a free model, forcing a reinvention of monetization, a crucial element of the chain that “professional” artists obviously need. As more and more creators experiment free models, mixed reviews come in. This fascinating interview of Jean-Louis Murat, a French musician who is known for being very opinionated, gives a harsh perspective:

You have been one of the first French artists to open a web site in 1998 and to offer songs, exchanges, links, images on it. Is you current anti-internet stance in contradiction with that?

[…] At the beginning, I was putting an exclusive song on my site every week, downloadable for free. Then I stopped. These songs were downloaded without a “thank you”, without a “hello” , and eventually sold as paying compilations in conventions. I belonged to the idiots who believed in the mirages of the internet, and therefore to the inner goodness of people, to communautary exchanges.

Link (in french)

And now Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:

I’ve been watching with great interest as the band “Radiohead” pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That’s when the market value of music will approach zero.

That’s my guess. Free is more complicated than you’d think.

Link

Free is not an option as it will be forced by consumers, so the question is not about wheter is can happen or not.The lesson here is that free is not something that can happen by simply taking money out of the equation. Both artists and listeners need to adapt and re-negotiate how they will interact. Artists having the longest way to go in their quest for new monetization channels, but consumers should also adapt their behaviors and change their outlook on artists who are more and more enhancing our lives and less and less pieces of a puzzle trying to screw us as much as possible.

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 ;) ?

At least that is what the BBC is writing in an article about peer to peer networks undermined by users downloading files without redistributing anything. The solution: an imaginary “currency” that would enforce good manners, and a whole of bean counting to go with it of course!

Peer-to-peer networks can become sluggish if too many users download content without sharing with others.
Using bandwidth as a kind of currency helps to encourage better habits said Dr Johan Pouwelse [who] has been working with associate professor David Parkes to add an accounting system to Tribler to encourage users to upload as often as they download.

Link

Good to see accounting finally do a bit of good for humanity ;)

Here’s a suggestion to every Internet executive: take a Post-It note, write “EBay wasted $3 billion on Skype” and stick it to your monitor. Stare at it the next time some hot social whatever-2.0 company comes by and talks about growing fast and finding a revenue model later.
Link

The NYT is hitting Ebay with a tough headline now that the Skype deal officially resulted in a $1.43B loss. This deal - who made me and many others quite skeptic - seems to have created value for only one industry: Swedish private banking.

What was the last time you saw something that dropped your jaw on the Internet? I’m not talking about the evolution of dance or laughing baby youtube video, I am talking about new apps, new ideas, new business models. What’s exciting these days? As we are putting the finishing touch to the LIFT08 program, that’s the question I am asking around here at Picnic.

Amazingly this question puzzles most of my interlocutors, triggers a long silence, and usually ends with a unenthusiastic “Facebook” answer. It seems Techcrunch is filled with clones of clones announcements these days (that’s not a knock on Techcrunch but on all of us, the entrepreneurs and innovators).

Where is the excitement? Where are the digg, twitter, facebook and second life of tomorrow? Nova (LIFT’s editorial manager) and me have some ideas, but I’d like to know what the readers of these blogs think.

The IHT published a report on the increase in the number of suicides in South Korea, a consequence of the stresses of a (too) rapid evolution worsenen by new technologies. Modernization has brought many uncertainties and weakened the traditional family references while the Internet provides an easy way for suicide candidates to get together or get lethal drugs.

The increase in suicides in South Korea has been especially steep in recent years, almost doubling from 6,440 in 2000 to 12,047 in 2005, according to the National Statistical Office. […]

The government does not compile figures on how many suicides may have been inspired or aided by the Internet. But in an analysis of 191 group suicides reported in the news media from June 1998 to May 2006, Kim Jung Jin, a sociologist at Korea Nazarene University, found that nearly a third of the cases involved people who had formed suicide pacts through Internet chat sites.

Link

Asian societies seem to be particularly vulnerable to this phenomena. Are these countries paying the price of their fast-paced transition from third world traditional societies to modern superpowers? Or is it a wired society problem happening in Asia first, which means our European countries will soon have it too?