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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;) ?
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