flickr – Climb to the Stars

Hello From Kolkata [en]

[fr] En Inde. Des trucs (très) en vrac. Un podcast en français dans les liens.

I’m in India. For a month.

I did it again: didn’t blog immediately about something I wanted to blog about (the rather frightful things I learned about the anti-GMO movement, if you want to know) because of the havoc it wreaked on my facebook wall when I started sharing what I was reading. And as I didn’t blog about that, I didn’t blog about the next thing. And the next.

And before I know it I’m leaving for India in two weeks, have students to teach and blogs to grade, and don’t know where to start to write a new blog post.

The weather in Kolkata is OK. The trip to come was exhausting: 20 hours for the flights, add on a bit before and after. I didn’t sleep on the Paris-Mumbai leg because it was “too early”, and spent my four hours of layover in Mumbai domestic airport in a right zombie state. Needless to say there is nowhere there to lie down or curl up, aside from the floor. I particularly appreciated having to go to the domestic airport for my Mumbai-Kolkata flight only to be ferried back to the international airport while boarding, because “Jet Airways flights all leave from the international airport”. But I laughed.

It was a pleasant trip overall. Nearly no queue at immigration. Pleasant interactions with people. And oh my, has Mumbai airport come a long way since my first arrival here over 16 years ago. It was… organized. I followed the signs, followed instructions, just went along with the flow. I’ve grown up too, I guess.

I slept over 12 hours last night. I can’t remember when I did that last. I walked less than 500 steps today, bed to couch and back. I’ve (re)connected with the family pets: Coco the African Grey Parrot, (ex-)Maus the chihuahua-papillon-jack-russel-staffie mix (I can never remember his new Indian name), and the remaining cat, which I’ve decided to call “Minette”, who “gave birth” to two empty amniotic sacs yesterday and is frantically meowing all over the place. Looking for non-existent kittens, or missing her brother, who escaped about a week ago? Hopefully she will calm down soon.

I plan to play about with Periscope while I’m here. Everyday life in India seems like a great opportunity to try out live interactive video. Do follow me if you don’t want to miss the fun.

Oh, and don’t panic about the whole “meat causes cancer” thing.

Some random things, listened to recently, and brought to the surface by conversations:

Making Sex Offenders Pay — And Pay And Pay And Pay (Freakonomics Radio)
Saïd, 10 ans après (Sur Les Docks) — an ex-con, 10 years after, and how hard reinsertion is, when you’re faced with the choice between sleeping outside, unable to get a job, and committing another offense so that you can go back to prison; extremely moving story
You Eat What You Are, Part I and Part II (Freakonomics Radio again)
When The Boats Arrive (Planet Money) — what happens to the economy when immigrants arrive? it grows, simply; migrant workers need jobs, of course, but they also very quickly start spending, growing the economy and creating the need for more jobs; the number of available jobs at a given place is not a rigid fixed number

Yep, random, I warned you.

I can now do the Rubik’s cube and have installed Catan on my iDevices, if ever you want to play.

I’ve activated iCloud Photo Library even though I use Lightroom for my “serious” photos. Like the author of the article I just linked to, my iPhone almost never is connected to my Mac anymore. And the photos I need to illustrate blog posts are often photos I’ve just taken with my phone. I end up uploading them to Flickr through the app.

It seems the “photos ecosystem” is slowly getting there, but not quite yet. I’ve just spent a while hunting through my post archives, and I can’t believe I never wrote anything about using Google auto-backup for my photos. At some point I decided to go “all in”, subscribed to 1TB of Google storage, and uploaded my 10+ years of photos there. I loved how it intelligently organized my photos. Well, you know, all the stuff that Google Photos does.

Why am I using the past tense? Because of this: seems automatic upload of a whole bunch of RAW formats has quietly stopped. This is bad. Basically, this paid service is not doing what I chose it for anymore. I hope against reason this will be fixed, but I’m afraid I might be disappointed.

One thing I was not wild about with Google Photos was the inability to spot and process duplicates. And duplication of photos when sharing.

Flickr now has automatic upload and organising. Do I want to try that? Although I dump a lot of stuff in Flickr, I’ve been slack about processing and uploading photos lately. I’m hesitant. Do I want to drown my current albums and photostream in everything I snap? Almost tempted.

I think that’s enough random for now. It’s 10.30 pm and I’m starving, off to the kitchen.

Photos Online on Flickr, Facebook, and Google+ With Lightroom [en]

[fr] Comment je fais pour publier mes photos sur Flickr, Facebook et Google+ depuis Lightroom, avec les plugins de Jeffrey Friedl.

I like Lightroom a lot and have been using it for a few years now to manage my photos. I don’t do a lot of processing/retouching, and it fills my needs perfectly:

I can organize my photos on my hard drive the way I want (monthly, then “events” if needed)
It doesn’t touch the original photos (non-destructive editing)
I can retouch, crop, and do the stuff I deem necessary to improve my photos
I can batch-rename photos according to pretty much any template I want
I can upload photos to Flickr, Facebook, and Google+ directly from Lightroom.

I’ve been using Jeffrey’s Flickr plugin for a while now. The neat thing about Lightroom is that when you “publish” photos somewhere rather than “export” them, Lightroom maintains a relationship between the published photo and the one in your catalog. This means that if six months later you go over it again, crop it differently, or retouch it again, Lightroom can update the photo on Flickr for you.

Of course, you don’t have to: you can make a virtual copy of your photo in Lightroom and work on that one, without impacting the published photo; and you’re also the one who hits the publish button to update the photo on Flickr. It doesn’t happen completely automagically.

The only problem with this is for the person who has included one of the updated Flickr photos in a blog post. Updating changes the photo file name at Flickr, and breaks the insert. Thankfully, there’s a plugin for that.

I love my Flickr account and it contains pretty much all my (published) photos. I can’t deny, however, that a lot of my online social activity happens on Facebook, and that it’s a great environment for photos to circulate. Unfortunately Facebook has really crappy photo library management, so I’ve limited myself to uploading the odd album of photos every now and again. I needed a more sustainable process which didn’t involve exporting photos from Lightroom to my hard drive and uploading them manually.

Enter Jeffrey’s Facebook plugin. As Facebook sucks, however, you shouldn’t really use the publish relationship to update photos that you’ve changed since you uploaded them to Facebook. Initially, as all I wanted to do was simplify my export-upload procedure, I used the “export” capability of the plugin. That means that instead of creating a “publish service” I created an “export preset” (File menu) to send photos directly to Facebook. Once sent, they’re sent, and live their lives on their own.

What’s nice is that I can also export photos like that directly to my pages (Tounsi and Quintus will appreciate).

Jeffrey also has a plugin for PicasaWeb, which for all practical matters pretty much means Google+ (Google Plus). Google Plus seems better at handling photo updates, so I set it up as a “publish service”.

I realized that I could use “smart publish collections” to make things simpler. My sets are already defined on Flickr. For example, I have this set of chalet photos, and I just want to reproduce it on Google+ (and Facebook). With a smart album or collection, I can tell Lightroom to “just publish those photos which are in that Flickr set”. Easy! This made me set up Facebook as a publish service too.

I love Jeffrey’s plugins because they are very well-maintained (up-to-date). There is some clunkiness in places because he really pushes beyond the limits of what Lightroom was designed for, but if you’re willing to see the odd error message or use the odd workaround, that should bother you too much. The clunkiness is amply made up for by the extensive documentation you will find both on Jeffrey’s site and in the plugins.

One such workaround is required to create a smart publish collection: because of a Lightroom bug, you have to edit the publish service and add the collection from there. But thankfully Jeffrey is really good at documenting stuff and telling you what to do and how, so you just have to follow the instructions on the screen. Basically you create a smart album or set in the “edit publish service” screen, then once it’s done edit that album to set your “smart” criteria.

Two useful things to know:

images uploaded to Google+ don’t count against your storage limit if they are smaller than 2048x2048px;
setting jpeg export quality in Lightroom to more than 75 isn’t very useful, in most cases, and just makes file size huge, slowing down your uploads considerably.

Finally, Jeffrey’s plugins are donationware. He spends a lot of time on them, and if you find them useful, you should definitely chip in.

A Plugin to Compensate for Flickr Broken Embed Suckage? [en]

[fr] Quand on met à jour une photo dans Flickr, Flickr change le nom du fichier. Idée de plugin WordPress pour faire la chasse aux liens cassés.

A few days ago I started noticing this kind of thing in my posts:

The explanation? I’ve used my week of holiday-at-home to fool around quite a bit in Lightroom. Lightroom publishes my photos directly to Flickr. When I change a published photos, Lightroom updates it. But Flickr changes the file name when you republish a photo. And that breaks embeds.

(And yeah, Lightroom replaces the whole photo even if you’ve just edited metadata.)

To make things worse, my browser cache shows me all my photos, even the missing ones. So I don’t see which ones are missing.

Idea! A plugin that would crawl through all the embedded Flickr images in a blog, and make sure that all the photos display correctly. Produce a list of the posts and photos that need updating. Or even better, do it automatically (even if the link to the displayed photo is broken, the link to the photo page still works, and it should be trivial to get the updated embed code and replace it in the post.)

Anybody?

Photographie interdite! [fr]

[en] As the editor for ebookers.ch's travel blog, I contribute there regularly. I have cross-posted some of my more personal articles here for safe-keeping.

Cet article a été initialement publié sur le blog de voyage ebookers.ch (voir l’original).

Il y a quelques semaines je lisais un article du Times sur les excès des autorités face aux photographes amateurs. Puis j’ai trouvé cet article de Lonely Planet sur les interdictions de photographier dans plus en plus de lieux touristiques. Alors que nous sommes aujourd’hui tous photographes (en plus d’être sous vidéosurveillance la plupart du temps), on assiste à une sorte de lutte frénétique pour limiter la prise en photos de lieux ou de personnes.

Les motivations? En général: sécuritaires (terrorisme, pédophilie), commerciales (“si on laisse chacun photographier, personne n’achètera nos catalogues”) ou protection de l’original (êtres vivants ou vieilles reliques sensibles au flash, par exemple).

En Angleterre, comme le raconte bien l’article du Times ci-dessus, on assiste clairement à un excès de zèle de la part des autorités (ou pseudo-autorités). Les photographes s’organisent, pour connaître leurs droits et non-droits, et se révoltent en ligne en publiant au vu et au su de tous ces photos qu’on n’avait pas le droit de prendre, sur le site Strictly No Photography ou dans ce groupe Flickr, par exemple. J’avoue que personnellement j’adore l’idée de prendre des photos de panneaux “photos interdites” (mais shhh… c’est mal et je ne vous ai pas dit de le faire).

Pour les USA, on peut télécharger un PDF détaillant les droits des photographes — document utile à avoir sous la main en cas de confrontation.

A priori, quand on part en vacances, on ne pense rien du fait de prendre des photos. Maintenant qu’il est tellement facile de mettre tout son voyage en ligne, la notion de “photographie à usage privé” disparaît peu à peu, et il faut s’attendre à ce que tôt ou tard, une photo se retrouve inévitablement accessible au public. C’est ça qui change la donne.

Ce n’est pas simple, malheureusement. Certaines situations sont assez claires, comme l’interdiction de photographier dans le Louvre. Certains musées, lieux touristiques, monuments, etc. affichent clairement les interdictions. Mais que faire? Accepter, se révolter?

Pour ce qui est du droit à l’image de façon plus générale (surtout lorsque l’on photographie des personnes) il faut savoir que les lois changent de pays en pays. Ce qui est vrai en France ne l’est pas nécessairement en Suisse (ou ailleurs, voir les liens à la fin de cet article de Michelle sur la question).

Le sujet est vaste, et une petite recherche Google vous donnera de quoi vous cultiver à l’envi sur la question. Les discussions dans les forums de photographie abondent, mais on semble être dans une situation où respecter la loi à la lettre rend quasi impossible la pratique de la photographie de vacances dont on a l’habitude si on veut mettre ses oeuvres en ligne (autorisations écrites, ça vous dit?)

Alors hop, le coin des anecdotes. Il y a des années de cela, un ami m’avait dit qu’il s’était fait sèchement rappeler à l’ordre alors qu’il prenait des photos dans une gare de métro parisien. Pour ma part, je suis sortie assez rapidement d’un magasin dont j’avais photographié les produits (c’était pour les mentionner sur mon blog, en plus!) face au vendeur à la mine patibulaire qui me venait dessus. On m’a aussi demandé d’arrêter de photographier des amis dans un centre commercial (“shopping centre”) en Angleterre. Voilà ce qui me vient à l’esprit, rapidement, comme ça.

Vous avez sûrement vos propres expériences “non-photographiques” à partager, et on se réjouit de les entendre!

Crédit photo: Quentin Xerxes Zamfir (Flickr)

Linking Flickr Images in Thesis' Multimedia Box [en]

[fr] Instructions pour faire en sorte que les photos de la boîte multimédia du thème WordPress Thesis renvoient vers leur page Flickr.

I haven’t had Thesis on my blog for 24 hours that I’m already messing with it. Oh well. So, one thing I’ve done and will explain in some detail is added tons of photos from my Flickr account to the Thesis multimedia box up right, with links to the original Flickr pages.

I have shell access to my server, which makes life so much simpler. Once inside the rotator folder, all I have to do is grab the URL of the middle-sized photograph I want (All sizes > Medium) and wget it. For example: wget http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3252/2725414522_4a9b2887df.jpg
On the Thesis Options page, I insert the Flickr photo page URL in the “alt” field for that photo. It’s pretty easy to deduce it from the filename. For example: 2725414522_4a9b2887df.jpg => http://flickr.com/photos/bunny/2725414522/.
Following these instructions, I replaced one line in the multimedia_box_functions.php file so that the images would actually link to their Flickr page.

Voilà!

Flickr and Dopplr: the Right Way to Import GMail Contacts [en]

[fr] Il est maintenant possible d'importer des contacts depuis GMail (ou Hotmail) sans devoir divulguer son mot de passe, aussi bien chez Flickr que chez Dopplr. Génial!

A few days ago, I saw this (http://twitter.com/mattb/statuses/780694528) soar by:

> Impressed by passwordless import at http://www.flickr.com/impor… – does anyone know if that’s a *public* yahoo API they use? want!

I immediately went to investigate. You see, I have an interest in [social network portability](http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability) (also called [“make holes in my buckets”](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/13/please-make-holes-in-my-buckets/)) — I gave a [talk on SPSNs from a user point of view at WebCamp SNP in Cork](http://www.viddler.com/explore/steph/videos/35/) recently — and I am also concerned that in many cases, implementations in that direction make generous use of the [password anti-pattern](http://adactio.com/journal/1357) (ie, asking people for the password to their e-mail). It’s high time for [design to encourage responsible behaviour](http://www.disambiguity.com/design-ethics-encouraging-responsible-behaviour/) instead. As the [discussion at WebCamp shows](http://willknott.ie/2008/03/11/why-teach-a-man-to-be-phished/), we all agree that solutions need to be found.

So, what [Matt](http://www.hackdiary.com/) said sounded sweet, but I had to check for myself. (Oh, and Matt builds [Dopplr](http://www.dopplr.com/), in case you weren’t sure who he was.) Let me share with you what I saw. It was nice.

Go to [the Flickr contact import page](http://www.flickr.com/import/people/) if you want to follow live. First, I clicked on the GMail icon and got this message.

I clicked OK.

This is a GMail page (note the logged in information upper right), asking me if Flickr can access my Google Contacts, just this one time. I say “yes, sure”.

Flickr goes through my GMail contacts, and presents me with a list:

There is of course an “add all” option (don’t use it unless you have very few contacts), and as you can see, next to each contact there is a little drop down which I can use to add them.

When I’m done adding them, Flickr asks me if I want to send e-mail invites — which I don’t.

Neat, isn’t it?

Well, the best news about this is that Flickr isn’t alone. Dopplr (remember Matt?) [does the same thing](http://www.dopplr.com/account/invitations_via/gmail) — and also [for Windows Live Hotmail](http://blog.dopplr.com/2008/04/07/import-your-contacts-from-windows-live-hotmail/) now.

*Note and question mark: I just saw [Dopplr announced GMail password-free import back in March](http://blog.dopplr.com/2008/03/18/easier-gmail-contact-import-without-passwords/), before [Matt’s tweet](http://twitter.com/mattb/statuses/780694528). Did Dopplr do it before Flickr? Then, what was the tweet about? Thoroughly chronologically confused. Anyway, passwordless import of GMail contacts rocks. Thanks, guys.*

**Update:** Thanks for the chronology, Matt (see his comment below). So basically, Matt’s tweet was about the fact that though GMail and Hotmail allows services like Dopplr and Flickr to access contacts without requiring a password, Yahoo doesn’t. Flickr does it from your Yahoo account because they have special access. So, Yahoo, when do we get a public API for that?

FOWA: We've Got This Community: Now What? (Heather Champ & Derek Powazek) [en]

[fr] Notes prises à l'occasion de la conférence Future of Web Apps (FOWA) à Londres.

*Here are my live notes of this [Future of Web Apps (FOWA)](http://www.futureofwebapps.com/) session with [Heather Champ](http://hchamp.com) and [Derek Powazek](http://powazek.com/). They are probably incomplete and may contain mistakes, though I do my best to be accurate. Chances are I’ll be adding links to extra material later on, so don’t hesitate to come back and check. See [Derek’s post about this](http://powazek.com/posts/717), and [Suw’s notes of this session](http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/10/03/fowa07b_heather_champ_derek_powazek.php).*

Telling stories.

**Chelm Sweet Chelm**

Angels, trying to distribute something (?), and one of the sacks ripped and the contents spread out in the valley, and that valley became the town of Chelm (idiots). *steph-note: sorry, very confused, wasn’t concentrated.*

So, lots of stories around that. When you run a community site, you sometimes feel like you are living in Chelm. How can you make the most of your life in Chelm?

Heather and Derek are going to tell us some Chelm stories.

Derek will tell the first one, because it’s embarrassing to Heather’s employer.

Yahoo including **photos tagged “wii”** in a page. But you don’t really tell anybody about it. Users revolt: start tagging all sorts of things “wii”:

Heather: being the mothership, you’re always held to **higher standards** by your community. Do the right thing, *beyond* the legal requirements. Yahoo had the right to do this, but that didn’t make it “right”.

Derek: provide copious opt-outs.

Heather: last year, Flickr realised they were going to have to take the DB down (it was bad). So they decided to [turn it into a contest](http://flickr.com/photos/tags/flickrcolourcontest) instead of just displaying the “massage” message. Something like 2000 different entries. People responded really well. Gave away something like 16 Pro accounts instead of the 1 they had planned.

Derek: when you fucked up, say you fucked up. Confess. **You can earn a lot of credibility like that.** [When you suck](http://blog.flickr.com/2005/07/21/sometimes-we-suck/), own up.

Other example: FOWA sending out marketing e-mail to the “wrong list”, the ones who had opted out. “We screwed up!”

**Don’t keep score.** Here are the top… can be a really excellent way to motivate people when you’re playing a game. But with most web apps, it’s not about playing a game, it’s about sharing your photographs, telling stories… Use these scoreboards *when* you want to play a game. Otherwise it can actually work *against* your community.

Heather: Flickr interestingness. This is the only place in the Flickrverse where people are ranked. It was pretty bad when they launched (500 most…). It created aggravation and angst. Now it’s a randomly loaded page.

Derek: the goal of interestingness is to see some interesting photos. The error was showing them in a ranked order. “Hey, look how many photos are more interesting than mine!” Gaming behaviour can lead to a negative experience. (e.g. people trying to get to the front page of digg.)

Use scores where they make sense.

Heather: important to put an **editorial layer** on the “stuff”. “Contribute a photo of your day”: 20’000 people in the group, 7000 contributed photos, and 122 selected to be in the book. One way of bringing people to the forefront and rewarding them in a more collaborative way than just ranking.

Derek: producing print stuff is often seen as a money-maker. But actually, **providing physical real-life things is actually a great motivator to encourage people to participate in your online community**. JPEG Mag. Great photographers online, but never seeing anything in print. Getting published in the book was enough to get people motivated to participate in the virtual community.

Rip that band-aid (Heather): the [old skool merge](http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/32687/) thing. Flickr knew at some point they would have to migrate everyone to Yahoo IDs. Waited 18 months, and at some point… it’ll be in 6 weeks. Significant change that’s difficult for the community: don’t wait 18 months. 6 weeks is a good time. Discuss about it, answer people, but then do it, hold firm. **Sometimes you have to do things that are unpopular.** If Flickr hadn’t waited 18 months… would probably not have been that painful.

Derek: **community, manage thyself**. Give people the tools they need so that they can be the community manager for you. Build tools to support that. In Flickr: I manage comments for my own photos. It’s my spot, so I’m my own community manager. Heather: it allows people to establish the guidelines for themselves.

**Community expectations:** Heather loves lawyers. Pages and pages of terms of service. Expectations of what your role is to be in that community. Flickr didn’t have community guidelines when it began. At some point, they understood they needed a way to put those expectations in human-readable format. “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.” 4-5 bullet points. Doesn’t supercede the TOS, but helps make expectations understood. Understand that nobody reads those legalese TOS.

Derek: **don’t create supervillains**. We usually have sites with free membership. Anybody can create an account. First community moderation tool: “boot member”. But the booted member can come back, create another free account, but this time he’s pissed. Booting people creates supervillains. Come up with clever ways to minimize their damage, contact them directly, person-to-person. Design community so one person can’t make too much damage. E.g. one site, if you get on their “bad list”, the site just gets slower and slower for you. That’s clever!

Heather: members of your community are passionate. Passionately good, and passionately… passionate.

Derek: **know your audience**. Eg. Tahoe thing: create your own ad. But actually, all you could do was actually add some text. So they went wild, of course. Be careful how tiny the box is you put people in. Here it was tiny, people rebelled. You couldn’t do much. Constraints are good, but if there are too many, people rebel. Also, their site was available to everybody on the internet, not just Tahoe owners.

Last and most important lesson: **embrace the chaos**. When you create something where people have a voice, they’ll do something you don’t expect.

Heather: small company which had 4 computers stolen, one of the laptops had PhotoBooth set up to upload automatically to Flickr. Some dude with astounding tattoos unwittingly uploaded PhotoBooth photos to the company’s Flickr stream. “OMG, this could be the guy who got our computer!” To cut a long story short, this guy was “known to the police”, and his lawyer saw a piece about this in the local paper, and told him to turn himself in… which he did.

Ex: person who used geolocating photos to spell “fuck” over Greenland. Lots of hard work there!

Incorporate these things as you go forward.

Derek: pet profiles on Friendster, which they wiped out in a week-end! Created a business opening for Dogster/Catster. When people misuse your site, they’re telling you there’s something to do there. **Sometimes the misuse is the most valuable input you can get**.

Q: how do you deal with requirements from the mother company regarding the way you manage your community?

A (Heather): not much has “come down”. Often, the answer is education. Talk to people — lots of misguided “requirements” come from the fact they don’t really understand your community.

Derek: **design for selfishness**.

Q: How do you balance community with commerce?

A (Derek): fable that community and commerce have to be separate, but that’s wrong. We talk about “commerce” a lot with our friends (products, etc). JPEG: been very upfront about “what we’re doing with your work”, “what you get out of it”. Set expectations well in the beginning.

Heather: two kinds of Flickr accounts. Pro, you don’t see ads. Is it worth the money for user X? Running a community costs money. Somebody has to pay for it. “The web is free”: to a certain extent, but when it involves huge amounts of hardware, somebody has to pay for it.

Q: (?)

A (Heather): if you have a global community, you want to ensure that people can express themselves — but when it gets member-on-member, that makes her uncomfortable (abuse). “What’s acceptable in the community?” Have a “report abuse” link in the footer of every page of the site. If you come down too hard saying “you can’t say that”… Trout-slapping. Huge question. Some people join communities just to be trolls.

Derek: if something inappropriate is happening in a global forum, create a place where it’s appropriate, and send people there to discuss it, so the rest can get on with their lives.

Ethics and Privacy in the Digital Age [en]

[fr] Même si tout le contenu numérique que nous produisons court le risque de se retrouver un jour sur l'internet public, cela ne veut pas dire pour autant qu'il est acceptable de rendre public des informations qui ne le sont pas.

En l'occurrence, les réseaux sociaux comme Facebook permettent uniquement aux amis ou contacts d'un utilisateur d'avoir accès à leur profil. On n'y pense souvent pas, mais de plus en plus, ce qu'on peut voir sur le web dépend de qui nous sommes, et des relations (enregistrées) que l'on entretient avec d'autres utilisateurs.

Il convient donc d'être vigilant, sous peine de commettre des erreurs diplomatiques. Un ami à moi a ainsi rendu public aux 10'000 lecteurs d'IBcom une partie de mon profil Facebook, en illustration d'un article qu'il a écrit. Pas de gros désastre heureusement, mais s'il m'avait demandé, j'aurais tout de même fait un peu le ménage avant qu'il fasse sa saisie d'écran.

Over the last year, I’ve repeatedly asked for finer privacy control in the social tools I’m using (see [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/12/12/you-should-twitter/), [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/13/please-make-holes-in-my-buckets/), [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/03/24/brainstormdiscussion-the-future-of-blogging-technology-gabor-cselle/), [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/05/04/groups-groupings-and-taming-my-buddy-list-and-twitter/) and [here](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/we-need-structured-portable-social-networks-spsn/)).

To summarize, tools need to let users add **structure** to their social networks, which in turn will allow privacy management of data made available in or through the tool: “let people I tagged X see everything, let people I tagged Y see this and that, and let people I tagged Z see everything apart from that.”

If you think of how relationships and social networks function offline, this makes perfect sense: some people are part of your friends circle, some people are close friends, some people are co-workers, some people are acquaintances, others are business contacts, judo pals, people you meet up with to play cards. And you don’t say the same things about yourself to all those people.

Your “social network” is not homogeneous. It’s a collection of little sub-communities (which can be as small as one person), with fuzzy edges, overlapping, ever-changing. Why on earth an online social network should place all the people I’m connected to on one level (or even two, or three levels) is beyond me.

Were getting there (but way too slowly). [Pownce](http://pownce.com) and [Viddler](http://viddler.com) allow you to tag your contacts and use those tags to control privacy (though with interface issues). [Facebook](http://facebook.com), [Flickr](http://flickr.com), and probably various others don’t allow you to tag your contacts, but do provide a few (insufficient) levels of privacy. [Twitter](http://twitter.com) lets you choose if you want to protect your updates.

What I’m getting to is that in today’s web of social tools, what you get to see is more and more personalized. And **the information you can access about other people is often the result of your relationship to those people**, and what they decided to give you access to. **Just like in offline relationships.** This means that you, as the person with access to the data, **have an ethical responsibility towards the person who made some of his/her personal information available to you**.

**Because you have access to it, does that mean you have the right to publish it in a more public space? Well, I’d say the answer is most obviously “no”. By doing that, you’re betraying the trust of the person who made the data available to you.**

Now, of course, I’m the first to say that [you cannot control digital stuff you create](http://www.ciao.ch/f/internet/infos/2.3) and should be aware that you run the risk of seeing your private digital data ending up on the public internet at some point. “Even if it’s in a private setting, anybody can copy it and make it public.” Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s *right* to do so.

So, why am I writing this? Somebody just brought to my attention that [IB com](http://www.ib-com.ch/) published an article about Facebook in their latest issue. And **to illustrate that article, a screenshot of my Facebook profile was used**. The article was written by a friend of mine (“friendly-business-acquaintance” friend), who obviously had access to my “friends only” Facebook profile.

He didn’t ask me if it was OK to publish my Facebook profile in print. If he had, I might have said “no”, but I might also have simply sanitized my profile so that he could take a screenshot I would have felt comfortable showing to the public.

He didn’t realize that by publishing my Facebook profile or showing it to others outside my friends’ circle, he is making information I would like to keep somewhat private available to people I would not necessarily choose to give it to. In this case, it’s not disastrous, because I *am* pretty conservative about what I put online, even on my Facebook profile (and I’m more transparent then most, so there aren’t *many* things I keep private). But there are at times things there I would rather keep for people I know — not the 10’000 readers of IBcom.

Just like most bloggers do not consider everything said in a conversation over a glass of beer “fair game” for blogging (when in doubt, ask, unless you’re ready to jeopardize your relationships over this kind of stuff), not everything you access in social networks is fair game for publication.

As social networks get smarter about privacy, I think we’re going to bump into this kind of problem more. For the moment, it’s up to each of us to be vigilant about what we take of others’ content and make available elsewhere. And maybe we need tools that can help us keep track of privacy settings better, and warn us when we’re about to make such a “faux pas”.

Comment se faire connaître comme indépendant [fr]

[en] I'm often asked how I made myself known as a freelancer. I was lucky enough to have quite a bit of coverage, but when you look closely, the way I got people to find me was through my blog.

Start blogging about your passion and demonstrate your expertise on your blog. The rest will follow.

Histoire de combattre [la paralysie du blogueur](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/09/08/la-paralysie-du-blogueur/) voici un petit billet « sur le vif ». Il est fréquent qu’on me demande comment j’ai fait pour [me mettre à mon compte et devenir indépendante](http://stephanie-booth.com/). (Mon site professionnel, vers lequel je viens de faire un lien, a grand besoin d’être remis à jour, mais allez quand même jeter un coup d’oeil.)

Il y a près de dix-huit mois, j’ai [raconté un peu mes débuts](http://info.rsr.ch/fr/rsr.html?siteSect=1001&sid=6561399&cKey=1142842064000&bcItemName=declics&broadcastId=407128&broadcastItemId=6481009&programId=108616&rubricId=6500) dans l’émission « Déclics » de la Radio Suisse Romande. Vous pouvez probablement encore écouter ce que j’ai dit à l’époque.

En fait, c’est assez simple. En l’an 2000, j’ai un peu par hasard ouvert un blog, dans lequel je parlais de tout ce qui me chantait. Je pense que si on relit maintenant ces sept années d’écriture, on doit pouvoir voir comment mes intérêts ont évolué. Une des choses — parmi d’autres — qui m’intéressait, c’était l’intersection de la technologie d’Internet et des relations humaines. Les blogs tombent en plein là-dedans.

Petit à petit, alors que j’étais plutôt récalcitrante au départ, j’ai commencé à faire ce que l’on appelait du « metablogging » : je bloguais à propos du « phénomène blog ». Par ailleurs, mon blog gagnait gentiment en popularité. J’ai aussi créé le premier annuaire de blogs suisses.

Lorsque les premiers journalistes romands ont commencé à s’intéresser aux blogs, il n’ont pas tardé à s’adresser à moi (vu ma présence en ligne assez étendue, je n’étais pas très difficile à trouver) — d’une part en tant que blogueuse, mais d’autre part et assez rapidement en tant que personne qui y connaissait quelque chose aux blogs. J’ai eu droit à un véritable cercle vertueux en ce qui concerne [ma présence dans la presse](/about/presse/). Je suis tout à fait consciente qu’il y a là-dedans une bonne part de « au bon endroit au bon moment », et que les médias ont beaucoup aidé à me faire connaître du public.

Peu après, on m’a contacté pour me demander de faire une première conférence. J’ai rapidement mis en ligne [un site Internet professionnel](http://stephanie-booth.com) dans lequel j’annonçais quel genre de services j’étais en mesure de fournir. Entre le bouche à oreille, la presse, et surtout mon blog, la quantité de mandats a doucement augmenté durant la première année, jusqu’à ce qu’elle devienne suffisante pour que j’envisage de mettre entièrement à mon compte et de quitter complètement l’enseignement.

Comme je dis souvent, tout cela s’est fait « presque malgré moi ».

Si on me demande conseil, j’en ai un : bloguer, bloguer, bloguer.

Je sais que mon cas est un peu particulier : une partie de ce que je mets à disposition de mes clients, c’est mon expertise sur les blogs. Et j’utilise mon blog pour la démontrer.

Même si votre domaine d’expertise n’est pas les blogs, vous pouvez utiliser votre blog pour mettre en avant cette expertise. C’est l’outil idéal pour cela : relativement simple à utiliser, et qui permet une documentation au jour le jour de vos expériences, découvertes, réflexions et recherches dans le domaine qui vous passionne au point que vous avez décidé d’en faire votre métier.

Peu de gens aujourd’hui soutiendront qu’on peut se passer d’avoir un site Web si l’on se lance comme indépendant. Et en général, on désire que ce site Web [soit bien référencé](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/14/le-placement-dans-les-moteurs-de-recherche/). Les blogs sont extrêmement bien référencés dans les moteurs de recherche : la page d’accueil est mise à jour à chaque fois que vous publiez un nouvel article, chaque article a sa page propre, vous encouragez autrui à faire des liens vers votre contenu, et l’outil que vous utilisez [a été conçu pour faciliter le travail des moteurs de recherche](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/07/22/wordcamp-2007-matt-cutts-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/).

En bloguant, vous augmentez de façon importante votre visibilité sur Internet, et mettez sur pied du même coup une documentation fantastique de votre domaine d’expertise et de vos compétences. Pas mal, côté marketing, non ? Et le blog étant un extraordinaire outil de réseautage en ligne, il vous aidera également à rentrer en contact avec les personnes qui ont des intérêts similaires aux vôtres : des « collègues », des partenaires, des passionnés, et bien entendu… Des futurs clients.

En pratique ? Vous [créez un un blog chez WordPress.com](http://fr.wordpress.com/signup/) ([c’est tout simple à utiliser](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/07/20/bloguer-avec-wordpress-cest-facile/)), [ouvrez un compte chez Flickr](http://flickr.com/signup) ([attention à la prononciation](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/09/10/flickr-ca-se-prononce-comment/)) pour héberger vos images ou photos (peu importe le domaine dans lequel vous vous lancez, il y aura des illustrations d’une façon ou d’une autre). Le compte illimité chez Flickr coûte $ 25, utiliser son propre [nom de domaine](http://gandi.net/) pour son blog $ 10, et avoir un look personnalisé pour son blog (autre que la cinquantaine de mises en page disponibles gratuitement) $ 15, mais tout cela est optionnel.

Donc, pour pas un sou, vous pouvez avoir entre les mains un outil de communication marketing très puissant. Il « suffit » de l’alimenter !

*Petite page de pub — et très franchement, je n’ai pas commencé à écrire cet article avec l’idée de finir comme ça, du tout. L’utilisation de base du blog, d’un point de vue technique, et simple. C’est une chose qui fait sa force. Les difficultés qui peuvent se présenter sont d’ordre rédactionnelles et culturelles. Il est possible et réaliste pour quelqu’un qui se met à son compte d’apprendre tout ça sur le tas. Si votre temps est compté, par contre, ou si vous désirez vous donner les moyens de tirer le maximum de profit du média conversationnel qu’est le blog, cela vous tout à fait la peine d’investir une partie de notre budget marketing dans [une formation à cet outil](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/11/26/video-necessite-dune-formation-blogs/). Dans ce cas, bien sûr, vous savez [à qui vous adresser](http://stephanie-booth.com/contact/) : c’est tout à fait le genre de chose que je fais. Fin de la page de pub !*

We Need Structured Portable Social Networks (SPSN) [en]

[fr] Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux que l'on peut importer/exporter d'un outil/service à l'autre. Nous avons également besoin de pouvoir structurer ces réseaux sociaux qui contiennent souvent un nombre important de personnes. Nous avons besoin de réseaux sociaux portables structurés.

Christophe Ducamp s'est lancé dans une traduction de cet article. Allez donner un coup de main ou bien en profiter, selon vos compétences! Je n'ai pas lu cette traduction, mais je suis certaine qu'elle est utile. Merci Christophe!

Scrolling through my “trash” e-mail address to report spam, I spotted (quite by chance, I have to say) a nice e-mail from Barney, who works at [Lijit](http://www.lijit.com/). Barney asked me if I had any feedback, [which I’ll give in my next post](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/08/16/lijit-feedback/), because I need to digress a bit here.

Lijit is a really fun and smart search tool which allows to [search through a person’s complete online presence](http://www.lijit.com/users/steph “See mine.”), a remedy, in a way, to the increasing [fragmentation of online identity](http://twitter.com/stephtara/statuses/200579442) that’s bothering me so much these days. Actually, it was already bothering me quite a few months ago, when I wrote [Please Make Holes in My Buckets](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/02/13/please-make-holes-in-my-buckets/):

>So, here’s a hole in the buckets that I really like: I’ve seen this in many services, but the first time I saw it was on Myspace. “Let us peek in your GMail contacts, and we’ll tell you who already has an account — and let you invite the others.” When I saw that, it scared me (”OMG! Myspace sticking its nose in my e-mail!”) but I also found it really exciting. Now, it would be even better if I could say “import friends and family from Flickr” or “let me choose amongst my IM buddies”, but it’s a good start. Yes, there’s a danger: no, I don’t want to spam invitations to your service to the 450 unknown adresses you found in my contacts, thankyouverymuch. Plaxo is a way to do this (I’ve seen it criticised but I can’t precisely remember why). Facebook does it, which means that within 2 minutes you can already have friends in the network. Twitter doesn’t, which means you have to painstakingly go through your friends of friends lists to get started. I think coComment and any “friend-powered” service should allow us to import contacts like that by now. And yes, sure, privacy issues.

One thing the 2.0 world needs urgently is a way to abstract (to some extent) the social network users create for themselves from the particular *service* it is linked to. **We need portable social networks.** More than that, actually, we need **structured portable social networks** (SPSNs). I’ve already written that being able to give one’s “contact list” a structure (through “contact groups” or “buddy groups”) is vital if we want to manage privacy efficiently (in my horrendously long but — from my point of view of course — really important post “[Groups, Groupings, and Taming My Buddy List. And Twitter.](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/05/04/groups-groupings-and-taming-my-buddy-list-and-twitter/)”):

> I personally think that it is also the key to managing many privacy issues intelligently. How do I organise the people in my world? Well, of course, it’s fuzzy, shifting, changing. But if I look at my IM buddy list, I might notice that I have classified the people on it to some point: I might have “close friends”, “co-workers”, “blog friends”, “offline friends”, “IRC friends”, “girlfriends”, “ex-clients”, “boring stalkers”, “other people”, “tech support”… I might not want to make public which groups my buddies belong to, or worse, let them know (especially if I’ve put them in “boring stalkers” or “tech support” and suspect that they might have placed me in “best friends” or “love interests”… yes, human relationships can be complicated…)

> Flickr offers a half-baked version of this. […]

> A more useful way to let a user organise his contacts is simply to let him tag them. Xing does that. Unfortunately, it does not allow one to do much with the contact groups thus defined, besides displaying contacts by tag […].

In fact, we need structured social networks not only to deal with privacy issues, but also (and it’s related, if you think of it) to deal with social network fatigue that seems to be hitting many of us. I actually have been holding off writing a rather detailed post in response to [danah](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/)’s post explaining that [Facebook is loosing its context for her](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/08/10/loss_of_context.html) — something that, in my words, I would describe as “Facebook is becoming impossible to manage in a way that makes sense with my life and relationships.” Here’s what she says:

> Le sigh. I lost control over my Facebook tonight. Or rather, the context got destroyed. For months, I’ve been ignoring most friend requests. Tonight, I gave up and accepted most of them. I have been facing the precise dilemma that I write about in my articles: what constitutes a “friend”? Where’s the line? For Facebook, I had been only accepting friend requests from people that I went to school with and folks who have socialized at my house. But what about people that I enjoy talking with at conferences? What about people who so kindly read and comment on this blog? What about people I respect? What about people who appreciate my research but whom I have not yet met? I started feeling guilty as people poked me and emailed me to ask why I hadn’t accepted their friend request. My personal boundaries didn’t matter – my act of ignorance was deemed rude by those that didn’t share my social expectations.

danah boyd, loss of context for me on Facebook

I think that what danah is expressing here is one possible explanation to why people are first really excited about new social networking sites/services/tools/whatevers (YASNs) and then abandon them: at one point, or “contact list” becomes unmanageable. At the beginning, not everybody is on the YASN: just us geeky early adopters — and at the beginning, just a few of us. We have a dozen contacts or so. Then it grows: 30, 50, 60… We’re highly connected people. Like danah, many of us are somewhat public figures. From “friends of our heart”, we start getting requests from **people who are part of our network but don’t fit in *segment* we want to reserve this YASN to**. We start refusing requests, and then give in, and then a lot of the value the YASN could have for us is lost.

Unless YASNs offer us an easy way to structure our social network, this is going to happen over and over and over again. For the moment, [Pownce](http://pownce.com) and [Viddler](http://viddler.com) allow me to structure my social network. A lot of work still needs to be done in the interface department for this kind of feature. (Yes, [Twitter](http://twitter.com), I’m looking at you. You said “soon”.)

So, to summarize, we need **tools and services** which make our **social networks**

– **portable**: so that we can import and export our relationships to other people from one service to another
– **structured**: so that we can manage the huge number of relationships, of varying and very personal degrees of intimacy, that highly connected online people have.

**Update, an hour or so later:** [Kevin Marks](http://epeus.blogspot.com) points me to [social network portability](http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability) on the microformats wiki. Yeah, should have done my homework, but remember, this post started out as a quick reply to an e-mail. Anyway, this is good. There is hope.

Tag: flickr

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