Intense discussion about Facebook.

Meet me and my friend Florent in a video talking about Fabebook.

How e-culture changes television model.

The web is the first media that forces television actors to reconsider their communication model. Since ever, television is built on a "top to down" model. The channel choose the program and the spectator receives it. It is a passive way. The web 2.0 TV free thinkers are creating the "à la carte" TV. If you can create your own programs with the VOD since a few years, you can now write the scenarios of your series episodes.

Where are the Joneses? is a 2007 British daily online filmed sitcom created by the Imagination Group and sponsored by Ford of Europe, with writing support from Baby Cow Productions. The script of each two to five minute episode is a collaboratively written by viewers via wikis and social networking sites such as mySpace, Facebook, Flickr and blogs, with each character having their own Twitter feed.
The faux-documentary style video is filmed daily on location and is also available via YouTube. The first episode was released on 15 June 2007.
The plot follows Dawn Jones who discovers in the opening episode that she is the child of a sperm donor and follows her travels around Europe to find her 26 siblings. It stars Emma Fryer in the lead role, with Neil Edmond as Ian, the first brother she locates and who travels with her.
Unusually, the production is released under a Creative Commons 'Attribution-Share alike' licence, allowing it to be freely re-edited, even commercially, and press coverage has considered it as 'Wikipedia-like' in allowing anyone to edit and contribute to the storyline.
The internet-only release on the back of the current mania for online social networking has also generated substantial independent blog review and analysis.

These young guys who have fortunes on the internet.

These last years, the Web has been the spot for very young people to express their creativity.
For some lucky and clever ones, what had begin as a little project had become a huge success story.

Two of the three co-founders of Paypal were 27 years old when they launched this system. Last semester, the buyings have increased of 34%, with 12,2 Md$.

Max Levchin was born in 1975. He is a Ukrainian-born American computer scientist and entrepreneur widely known as co-founder (with Peter Thiel) and former Chief technology officer of PayPal. Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), he moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1991. He received his bachelor's degree in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1997 and co-founded two companies that made Internet-tools, NetMeridian Software and SponsorNet New Media. In 1998, he founded Fieldlink with John Bernard Powers, which was later restructured to become Confinity and eventually PayPal. PayPal went public in February 2002, and was subsequently acquired by eBay. His 2.3% stake in PayPal was worth approximately $34 million at the time of the acquisition.He is primarily known for his contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts and is also the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA. Meet him is this NerdTV interview.

Like Levchin, Luke Nosek, born in 1975 too, is another co-founder of PayPal and serves now as The Funders Fund Vice President of Marketing and Strategy. While at PayPal, Luke oversaw the company's marketing efforts at launch, growing the user base to 1 million customers in the first six months. Luke also created "Instant Transfer," PayPal's most profitable product. Prior to PayPal, Luke was an evangelist at Netscape. Luke has also co-founded two other consumer Internet companies, including the web's first advertising network, and has made a number of venture investments since 2000. Luke received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Should the police be involved in online murders announcements?

Tuesday 8th November 2007, seven schoolchildren and their principal were killed when a student opened fire in a town near Helsinki, in the deadliest shooting in Finland's history. The gunman shot himself in the head and died later in hospital.

The 18-year-old student, identified by police as Pekka-Eric Auvinen, started shooting with a handgun during lessons yesterday at the Jokela secondary school in Tuusula, killing five boys and two girls as well as the principal, Helena Kalmi, police said at a news conference.

Two hours before police learned of the shootings, the gunman posted a warning with pictures of the campus and an armed man on YouTube, an online video service of Google Inc., officials said.

Ten children were treated for minor injuries at Hyvinkaeae hospital in a town near the school, Ulla Keraenen, a senior surgeon there, said in a telephone interview. None of the children had been shot, she added.

Tuusula is a town of about 35,000 people 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of the capital.

Rescue Crews

Police were called to the school at 11:43 a.m. local time yesterday. Officers were on the scene 11 minutes later and tried to talk to the gunman, who fired one shot at them without hitting anyone. Rescue crews had to evacuate pupils, teachers and other school workers through the windows.

Searchers found the attacker injured shortly after 3 p.m., according to the Tuusula municipality Web site. The gunman and most of his victims were found in the lower lobby of the building, police said. (bloomberg.com)

The question coming after this is : Should the police be involved ahead of the act in cases like this? We have to keep in mind that we are in a growing trend (recall the case in Virginia Tech)

It is sure, the police can't listen to all desperate teenagers of the word who post videos of them on Youtube. It would cost too much employees, time and money.

On the other hand, things have to change. Until this happens again. I don't have any ideas about what is technologically possible. But it seems to me that Youtube have a surveillance system. They may apply it to the videos containing dark messages and they may transfer it to the police. So maybe they could act on time.

Google : cannibal or super heroe ?

Everyday, Google is becoming bigger, offering new services. Even if, they are not. For example, Google begins hosting content from 4 news services on its own site The Associated Press instead of only sending readers to other destinations.

The change affects hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day by the AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press. It could diminish Internet traffic to other media sites where those stories and photos are also found — a development that could reduce the online advertising revenue of newspapers and broadcasters.

Google negotiated licensing deals with the AP and French news agency during the past two years after the services raised concerns about whether the search engine had been infringing on their copyrights. The company also reached licensing agreements with The Press Association and The Canadian Press during the same period.

Financial terms of those deals have not been disclosed.

The new approach does not change the look of Google News or affect the way the section treats material produced by other media.

Although Google already had bought the right to display content produced by all four news services, the search engine's news section had continued to link to other Web sites to read the stories and look at the photographs.

That helped drive more online traffic to newspapers and broadcasters who pay annual fees to help finance the AP, a 161-year-old cooperative owned by news organizations.

Now, Google visitors interested in reading an AP story will remain on Google's Web site unless they click on a link that enables them to read the same story elsewhere. Google does not have any immediate plans to run ads alongside the news hosted on its site.

Although the change might not even be noticed by many Google users, the decision to corral the content from the AP and other news services may irritate U.S. publishers and broadcasters if the move results in less traffic for them and more for Internet's most powerful company.

A diminished audience would likely translate into less online revenue, compounding the financial headaches of long-established media already scrambling to make up for the money that has been lost as more advertisers shift their spending to the Internet.

Google has been the trend's biggest beneficiary because it runs the Internet's largest advertising network. In the first half of this year, the 9-year-old company earned $1.9 billion (€1.4 billion) on revenue of $7.5 billion (€5.5 billion).

Despite Google's dominance in search, its news section lags behind several other rivals. In July, Google News attracted 9.6 million visitors compared with Yahoo News' industry-leading audience of 33.8 million, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Yahoo Inc., along with other major Web sites such as Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, have been featuring AP material for years.

Under its new approach, Google reasons readers would not have to pore through search results listing the same story posted on different sites. That should in turn make it easier to discover other news stories at other Web sites that might previously have been buried, said Josh Cohen, the business product manager for Google News.

"This may result in certain publishers losing traffic for their news wire stories, but it will allow more room for their original content," Cohen said.

Vlae Kershner, news director for the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site, backed up that theory, saying Google News mostly refers readers interested in the newspaper's staff-written stories. "This is going to have a very minimal impact on our traffic," he said.

Referrals from Google News accounted for 2.2 percent of the traffic at newspaper Web sites during the week ending Aug. 25, according to the research firm Hitwise.

Caroline Little, chief executive and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, said she worries about anything that might erode her site's advertising revenue. "That's how we make money," she said. "We will be watching this carefully."

For its part, the AP intends to work with Google to ensure readers find their way to breaking news stories on its members' Web sites, said Jane Seagrave, the AP's vice president of new media markets.

In recognition of the challenges facing the media, the AP froze its basic rates for member newspapers and broadcasters in the U.S. this year.

That concession has intensified the pressure on AP to plumb new revenue channels by selling its content to so-called "commercial" customers on the Web. Those efforts helped the not-for-profit AP boost its revenue by 4 percent last year to $680 million (€496 million).

"AP relies on its commercial agreements to help pay the enormous costs of covering breaking news around the world, ranging from deadly hurricanes and tsunamis to conflicts like the war in Iraq," Seagrave said.

This example shows us that the proliferation of Google services is the hardest thing that the competitors could have supported.

How creativity is being strangled by the law ( Larry Lessing Conference)

This an amazing video conference by Larry Lessing, The Net's most adored lawyer, about copyright issues. He is fighting here for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition in a elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument."

Let's talk about trust on the internet.

Trust is an important issue on the internet. We will discuss this theme with the american website Prosper.com
Prosper permits to people to lend for free, to borrow and to be in an online community. People who need money request it, and other people bid for the privilege of lending it to them. Prosper makes sure everything is safe, fair and easy. Prosper is the go-between who allows exchanges and who shakes that trust is not is not violated.
In all communities, above all when there are economical exchanges, everything is based on trust originaly. The garantee offered by Prosper permits not to detract the operations.
There are a lot of sites like that: Ebay, Etrade...
The expansion of the Web 2.0 solution where we find always more interactivity and direct exchanges, people-to-people, make me think that we will find more sites like Prosper in the future.

I am back

Hello!

After a thesis on webcomics and few vacation, I am back with you for a year to dicuss about e-culture.

Backup your records and save your life

When someone robbed me my labtop last year, I thought I was going to loose my identity. I didn't backup my ressources...because I am so clever.
So now I keep my external memory bar and my usb keys always with me....

“FaceBook stalking”

"Facebook stalking" is the term that has developed for this typically harmless practice of finding people (or finding their profiles, at least) on Facebook and learning about them without their knowledge or consent. "It's a lot easier than the real thing," said freshman Abe Del Rio. Facebook stalking is mostly harmless and used to find out someone's e-mail to coordinate a class project or to discover other people on campus with common interests and tastes.

But it isn't just students that are Facebook stalking anymore. Campus security and residence life staffs have begun using pictures posted on the social networking site to find and prosecute students for alcohol violations. At Western Washington University, four students were placed on probation and one was asked to leave the housing system based on alcohol violations that were documented and discovered through Facebook.

Privacy pollution, the modern freedom robbery

The expression “privacy pollution” refers to a diary problem we all know: the "junk" mails and the spams. We all receive every day newletters about the new technologies to enlarge our penis...
You see? That's it.
What are some of the concerns?

E-mail spam is the most common form of internet spamming. It involves sending unsolicited commercial messages to many recipients. Unlike legitimate commercial e-mail, spam is generally sent without the explicit permission of the recipients, and frequently contains various tricks to bypass e-mail filtering.
Spammers obtain e-mail addresses by a number of means: harvesting addresses from Usenet postings, DNS listings, or Web pages; guessing common names at known domains (known as a dictionary attack); and "e-pending" or searching for e-mail addresses corresponding to specific persons, such as residents in an area. Many spammers utilize programs called web spiders to find e-mail addresses on web pages (see also address munging). Many e-mail spammers go to great lengths to conceal the origin of their messages. They might do this by spoofing e-mail addresses (similar to Internet protocol spoofing). The spammer will modify the e-mail message so it looks like it is coming from another e-mail address. However, many spammers make it easy for recipients to identify their messages as spam by placing an ad phrase in the From field. Spammers try to circumvent the email filters by intentionally misspelling common spam filter trigger words.
For example, "viagra" might become "vaigra", or other symbols may be inserted into the word as in "v/i/a/g./r/a". E-mail service providers have begun to use the misspellings themselves as a filtering test. The most dedicated spammers—often those making a great deal of money or engaged in illegal activities, such as the pornography, casinos and Nigerian scam businesses—are often one step ahead of the providers. Retail e-mail services are updated constantly with improved spam filters, keeping track of spammers' technological progress by examining e-mails their users report as spam (many providers today have a prominent button to report spam). So-called "spambots" are a major producer of e-mail spam. The worst spammers create e-mail viruses that render an unprotected PC a "zombie computer"; the zombie will inform a central unit of its existence, and the central unit will command the "zombie" to send a low volume of spam. This allows spammers to send high volumes of e-mail without being caught by their ISPs or being tracked down by antispammers; a low volume of spam is instead sent from many locations simultaneously.
Bill Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2004, predicted that spam would soon be "a thing of the past", and that Microsoft was working on several temporary solutions, as well as on a permanent "magic solution", to spam.

The California legislature found that spam cost United States organizations alone more than $10 billion in 2004, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.

Spam's direct effects include the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted messages. In addition, spam has costs stemming from the kinds of spam messages sent, from the ways spammers send them, and from the arms race between spammers and those who try to stop or control spam. In addition, there are the opportunity cost of those who forgo the use of spam-afflicted systems. There are the direct costs, as well as the indirect costs borne by the victims - both those related to the spamming itself, and to other crimes that usually accompany it, such as financial theft, identity theft, data and intellectual property theft, virus and other malware infection, child pornography, fraud, and deceptive marketing.

It is complicated to fight it because spamming itself abridges the historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the costs of material which they would not choose.
But there are actions, as I will explain it here.

An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU has to do with so-called "stealth blocking", a term for ISPs employing aggressive spam blocking without their users' knowledge.
These groups' concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce spam-related costs may select tools which (either through error or design) also block non-spam e-mail from sites seen as "spam-friendly". SPEWS is a common target of these criticisms. Few object to the existence of these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed of their use which draws fire. Some see spam-blocking tools as a threat to free expression—and laws against spamming as an untoward precedent for regulation or taxation of e-mail and the Internet at large. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some spam as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and conversion, some laws specifically targeting spam have been proposed.
In 2004, United States passed the Can Spam Act of 2003 which provided ISPs with tools to combat spam. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head, reportedly one of the biggest spammers in the world, who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004.
Examples of effective anti-abuse laws that respect free speech rights include those in the U.S. against unsolicited faxes and phone calls, and those in Australia and a few U.S. states against spam. In November 2004, Lycos Europe released a screensaver called make LOVE not SPAM which made Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the spammers themselves. It met with a large amount of controversy and the initiative ended in December 2004.Court cases Attorney Laurence Canter was disbarred by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in 1997 for sending prodigious amounts of spam advertising his immigration law practice. Robert Soloway lost a case in a federal court against the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of spamming. U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law. In the first successful case of its kind, Mr. Nigel Roberts from the Channel Islands won £270 against Media Logistics UK who sent junk e-mails to his personal account.

Youtube personal pages implication

When you create a personal page on you tube, it can have a lot of implications. Why?
First of all, because you enter in a community which is uge because Youtube is incredibly popular. This makes you involved in the web life and in the activity you chose. For example, if you upload videos you will have a lot of contact in this sector and you will be free to creates new pages with others youtube guys.
You can also be implicated in the web economic life if someone have noticed you for your talents or originality. It involves too the question of artistic property. If your production is at a buzz start, you artistic or entertainment life will change.
For me, the best use of Youtube profile is the professional one.
I think it is really helpful when for example you have an association without financial suppport. It is the best advertisement in terms of rentability and exposition. You are sure to find a public. It is the same thing for young artists who can express themselves in this site without technical matters. I show you here what I mean by the way of an animation picture.
Even in the big companies, the e-cv is a good thing to see how the employees behave themselves behind new technologies. It is a new way to evaluate the candidate, who is more free to present himself with his own words. i think this is a good invention but not for everybody. There are people who are no used to be filmed. They could fill really ill at ease to present themselves in a professional way in front of a camera. For me it is important to respect this. We have to let people chose how he wants to present himself.
The results are amazing. There is an example of e-cv I found of You Tube.
Enjoy.

A definition of the web content management system

A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to Web sites.
We generally use it for storing, controlling, versioning, and publishing industry-specific documentation such as news articles, operators' manuals, technical manuals, sales guides, and marketing brochures. It may support the following features:
- Import and creation of documents and multimedia material
-Identification of all key users and their content management roles
- The ability to assign roles and responsibilities to different content categories or types.
- The definition of the content workflow tasks, often coupled with event messaging so that content managers are alerted to changes in content.
- The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content.
- The ability to publish the content to a repository to support access to the content. Increasingly, the repository is an inherent part of the system, and incorporates enterprise search and retrieval.
For example, we use it right now on this blog. We made a wiki in my class where we also use CMS.