Just before you go to LIFT08, head to Sierre on January 25th to listen to Bruno Giussani and Frederic Kaplan talk about communicating objects and mobile internet, the future of the web?

LIFT lab is managing the morning program of what should be an interesting day in Valais to discuss some of the two most important trends on the Internet. More information on rezonance.ch

This is one of the main upcoming changes on the web: HD. You can feel the movement brewing with sites like the HD web. Now YouTube seems to be joining the ranks of HD content providers in a few months. About time.

Davos is really shaking it’s image of a closed and elitist conference. The latest move: youtube.com/davos, or your chance to jump in the debate right from your computer screen.

Congrats to Matthias Luefkens and the WEF teams for pushing the envelope like this. For more information head to GenevaLunch.

I’m finally giving Twitter a try out of curiosity. No guarantee I’ll be there for long but so far so good. It is strange to open an account on a system you know could ruin your privacy like that. It makes you look at the features with extra care.

Fascinating stuff as usual. Google Zeitgeist.

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.

Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century
Dr.Vinton Cerf, Google, USA

Abstract
In this talk, Vint will address the current status of the Internet, some of the technology changes that are driving its evolution, and some of the global policy issues that have to be dealt with. Among many such issues are included IPv6, mobility, increasing capacity in the core and the edges, broadband alternatives, competition, security and authentication. He will suggest a number of new applications relevant to business and research, before turning to the device-driven Internet that includes sensor networks, control systems, Internet-enabled appliances and so on. Finally, he will report on the status of the interplanetary extension of the Internet now underway at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session.

Short Bio
Vinton G. Cerf is a vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications for Google. Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related data packet switching technologies. He is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.
Cerf and his colleague Robert E. Kahn received the ACM Turing award in 2004 for founding and developing the Internet. Besides this highest distinction for a computer scientist he is holding numerous awards and honors in engineering, science and as an inventor. He started his career with a mathematics degree from Stanford, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 1972 and received over a dozen honorary degrees since then, including the Dr. sc. techn. h.c. from ETH in 1998.
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More information here. I’ll be there.

Ouriel posted interesting reference numbers, like the market cap of the biggest internet players:

And the evolution of the audience of social networks over the past 12 months:

I gave a presentation at my favorite incubator on an original topic: how to maintain an effective online existence with very little efforts. I came up with four main angles:

Capture your latent content

By spending a few seconds here and there you can create an effective online presence. Our/think portal is a good example of capturing latent content. The idea is to identify a number of contributors and let them do what they always do (read articles, take pictures, go to events, etc…), adding a small step to their daily actions to recuperate the content and integrate it in a website.

Here is a screenshot of LIFT think:

This whole page is generated with very little effort:

• The pictures come from a flickr account. Add a picture and will automatically appear without any human intervention.
  Added effort: upload picture to LIFT lab’s account (1 minute in the worse case)
• Next events comes from Upcoming where, every time a member of the team adds an event to the LIFT lab profile, it will show up here.
  Added effort: add event to LIFT lab’s upcoming account (10 seconds)
• What we are reading is retrieved from delicious. A member of the teams reads an article, find it interested, all he has to do is press on a button to add the article to this section of the site.
  Added effort: add event to LIFT lab’s bookmarks on delicious (5 seconds)
• The we are showing all our blog posts reorganized by main news, topic, popularity or date. Yes, writing a blog takes some time, but you can also put a more simple form of blog here like a link blog or a micro blog as explained towards the end of this article.
  Added effort: tag content, and mark it as main news when it is the case (5 seconds)

As you can see, all this information is already here (the authors take pictures and read articles anyway), all we did was asking them to go one extra and short step to capture the content, and the result is pretty useful.

Augment others content and bring traffic back to your site

Find those who are talking about something relevant to your business on Technorati
Create a watchlist and subscribe to it via RSS
Visit these sites, and make a comment if you have something that adds value to say
Some readers will like what you say and want to discover who is behind the comment

Microblog

Twitter and Jaiku come to mind here, and the 160 characters limit will be welcome by those who don’t want to spend too much time writing. Update your flow as soon as you have something interesting happening to you (can be a thought, an impromptu encounter, a nice article). Then your friends and maybe your colleagues and clients can follow you and know what you are up to. Presence is an added benefit of this form of content, the fact that your followers will be able to know what you have been up to without actually seeing you.

Link blog

A nice way to blog is to only post links of things you found interesting, with or without comments. I don’t recommend using a script to generates automatic posts, but done smartly (mix of raw links and links with quotes and a one sentence comment) it is a nice and useful form of blogging that won’t take you hours.

Now that I have a hard drive recorder at home, I can really relate on the great appeal of my personal, pre-recorded channel compared to live programs. Pre-recorded TV is the future as Vinton Cerf explained at a recent conference:

“85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,” he said. “You’re still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.”

Link

On a side note, whoever doubts the quality of user generated content should be forced to go through the 200+ channels I get at home, and tell me in all honesty how many they think qualify for something else than “total crap”. My count: 10, a mere 5%.