Stetoscope

Do you feel insulted by this painting? Well, if the question seems a bit ridiculous today, it would not have been if you had lived in the 13th century in europe. You would have been shocked by this painting.

Why? For the very reason that this painting seems common today : it follows the rule of perspective. You have to imagine that before, Leon Battista Alberti, the characters were not reprensented at scale and adjusted to the perspective, their sized represented the intensity of their faith in god. Thus hollies were really big and always located in imaginary worlds with angels and strange creatures. Here, the scene takes place in Toscana, just where Alberti was from and the characters even Jesus representation respect the perspective rule… Is not it outrageous?

This example shows how we interpret the world through our own old background and not through new eyes. The challenge of new ideas is to succed in settling a new representation. That’s one of the edge line of this blog : how to create new representation to settle innovations? As you can my two weeks holidays in Tuscany did not changed my obsession. I am glad to be back and hope to see you soon swinging by there.

The inrockuptible has published an article this morning about the print press revenue. It is not good. Roughly speaking print dailynews sale less (in terms of quantity) -2.4% and the advertizing revenue is lowering under the effects of both 1. crisis that lowers the intensity of the advertizing market, 2. competition of many other support. Eventually the whole sector move back -3.5% to 835 Meuros of global revenue.

After a closer look a distinction must be done : print national press has suffered most, the print regional press has just remained equal and the print magazine press & free print national press are the winners of the race.

It confirms some key elements :

1. Print press is threaten

• people are no more about paying daily news : advertizing will be the only financial resource
• print press will have to have to lower its costs to stay in the race especially during crisis period

2. Still some hypothesis must be explored :

• a lot of writings and news are available for free ( journalist do not have to write anymore)
• the two tasks of journalist are : edition (find the best writings about a subject) and checking the validity of the news.

www.pearltrees.com

Something really interesting is happening in France right now! I see a lot of bloggers that complains about those new social services that they feel forced to use every week… Here are a few example those complaints: Sarkofrance about friendfeed, Monsieur Poireau about permanent novelty and last night Gaby telling me that he likes writing and could not save time for twittering activities… Some bloggers are tired of playing the ranking game to improve their social power. They have enough of spending time to trade their links, twitter their posts, share their post, just to improve their ranking in Digg, technorati, stumble or wikio. They want to write, think, analyse and not waste time broadcasting their posts. Raising a question : Who will do it for them?

In the same time the media crisis still grows. The financial crisis limits advertizing revenues and the threat extends from prints journalist to some web journalism model. An alliance between print and web journalist could even be a realistic hypothesis. The evil one, here are those shameless actors that do not write but edits existing contents barely checking the veracity of the News they broadcastd. Raising a question : Is writing still compatible with journalism ?

The third phenomenon is the will of readers to not stay passive. Of course they still read but in a quickest way and they want to discuss with the writer or the editor of the news. It seems to me that actors that maximize the interaction with their community securize the loyalty of their audience. Raising a question : what will be the role of those participating readers?

Now  some other disparate elements:

1. the need of information has never been so high (as to quality, proximity and quantity)
2. guaranted news are valued (it explains the remains of famous press brands like the NYT)
3. Readers enwide their reading fields but cannot dedicate more time to news consumption
4. There are plenty of very good free writers
5. Experts are numerous whatever the subject
6. The revenue generated by the media industry should lower significantly
7. People do invest in their personnal branding (explaining point 4)

Here I just wanted to start a reasonning and a discussion…

My only intuition: this sector is not organised at all and the trading rules or not clear at all. I will try to clearer them so every could go to his own trade.

“Strawberries cherries and an angels kiss in spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things”

Summer is always a strange period… The weather warm, the towns look empty, the days last twice long as they do in winter and the web seems abandonned for beatch or old media. However, it is a very inspiring season. We can look serenely to the year to come, prepare events, take advantage of the feedbacks we recieved during the first month of pearltrees alpha. It is also a time when we can meet with people, talk about what we will do together. That’s exciting.

I just love summer in the city.

A community could be defined as a group of people that shares :
> a place : a place, a website, a house, anything but a common place
> a conversation even silent monks are in a spiritual conversation
> common rules : even if they are not written anywhere
> a langage : a community develop its own codes, its own system of signs

However, even if a sociologist, a monk, a hippie or a community manager would not disagree on this open definition that does not mean they the community concept would be the same in their heads.

The sociologist is anchored in a discribing and theorizing structures and the forces that animate a community. The community manager is one of the force. He wants to make its community grows the quickest and the most robustly possible. One is a man of consistency and theory, the other is a man of movement and strategy.

I think, that this representation is a bit basic. Indeed a community manager must keep both concpetions in mind. The first to identify a target : define a social group, understand its rules and anticipate its inner dynamic. The second to settle a plan to become the essential media of a specific community.

The melt of the both sides make it interesting.

It can be seen as a relief too many people (and I include myself in this categorie) that human beings do not working on the same scheme as brand. For exemple, a human being lives his life continously and is aging continously and thus goes through different steps all along their lives. A brand is not! A brand is not aging. A brand works everyday to still fit with the segment it should fit with whereas the people in that segment are changing everyday. Sometimes Dorian-Gray-illed-people buys brands for younger people but they are ill (and quite many)… and that is not the point here.

To keep up with their segment brand, regularly, launch new products, new formula, new packaging, new concept-stores,… New things. So marketing people works for month in an excited fever to the “next thing” on their market. I still wonder what will be the next thing for breakfast cereal, may be dinner cereal that helps to have  wonderfull night… Anyway, the key thing in that process is when the launch will be. From this point everyone is building a retroplanning  and prepare the event.

That is not exactly the same in the Internet industry (may be some actor are not exactly like pearltrees and have reproduced the schemes of the old eceonomy)! At least at pearltrees. We are in alpha and will stay at this step quite a long time. It means pearltrees functionnalities will move contineously through weeks, month and years… And that is really good. The only thing is that there is no yardstick to refer to. There is no possibility to launch (or everyday).

The whole thing is to optimize (what do I say ? to who? when? where?) in order to get to the best return on participation to the discussions on the web. How to participate to maximise the direct and indirect share of voice…

Well, I guess I have to work now!

I am very interested in this rock-band name. I think it grasp a strange state of mind that appears in the whole society and especially in the web 2.0 world. Sometimes I wonder if, with comming summer, people do not feel tired of being participative, tired of this collective spirit…

Two facts :

• a decrease of the number of comments on big blogs like RWW, techcrunch, mashable,…
• rumours insisting on the fact the new facebook is less interesting than before

Sometimes I feel like if Twitter was the only one that would keep the magic alive… Fortunatly, this just a feeling. I think, there are are more on more users that participates to web creation. Moreover, webusers seem to be more mature. I think webusers are becoming more selective (about where it is interesting for us to participate) and more qualitative (we pay more attention to the quality of our participations) as to their paraticipation activities. Webusers are not “cansei de ser sexy”, they are managing their efforts to be more sexy! And, that is great…

I love this video because it exactly shows how collective histeria comes. First, the guy is alone, it is a bit ridiculous to see him dancing like this all alone. When the second guy arrives there is a kind of risk : will they fight? Will they stop togther laughing of themselves… When the third guy arrives we understand how exciting it is just to free-dance like this on the grass during a sunny afternoon. Suddenly the balance turns from look at those funny guys to that is so cool, I want to be with them. And people start to scream, and a first group of people arrives, the another… more and more screams and everybody gather in a collective joy.

It is here the first collective joy or histeria, I have ever seen from start to end in three minutes. I think it shows and explain what happened on larger scale for beatlemania or facebook success. It is very interesting for pearltrees. Let’s try to identify the factors that makes this collective histeria happens :

1. everybody hear and can see what happens => communication or visibility
2. it takes one minute before the first group join and the collective hysteria starts at two minute laters => time
3. a surnatural excitment from those who are experiencing the free-dance => testimonial
4. people that shows there is no cost of entrance (no shame) => Free or not expensive

The second challenge which is not in the video is how long will they dance? That was in the bealtes amazing creativity, in facebook amazing platform and that will be in pearltrees amazing interaction between the community and the platform.