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.