Category: Social Media and the Web

Social media, blogging, tweeting, facebooking, web design, and all the stuff that isn’t here yet. Subcategories highlight some areas of particular expertise.

#buspeople and #trainpeople: Annoying People in Public Transport [en]

[fr] Un tumblr pour collecter automatiquement les commentaires sarcastiques au sujet de nos covoyageurs des transports publics, publiés sur Twitter avec les hashtags #buspeople ou #trainpeople.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (I’m @stephtara) know that I regularly make snarky comments about annoying or irritating (or sometimes simply very weird) people encountered while using public transportation.

It smells like spring this morning, and I was up late last night putting together the little project that has been trotting around in my head: a tumblr blog, Annoying People in Public Transport, which collects tweets containing the and hashtags.

Setting up a tumblr to capture hashtagged tweets is dead simple with ifttt — here is the recipe for the tasks I used.

So, next time you’re tempted to make a snarky comment on Twitter about a co-passenger, don’t forget your hashtag!

Reminders With Future Triggers: Building an Intelligent Calendar [en]

[fr] L'idée que j'ai pitchée au StartupWeekend Lausanne, plus en détail et mieux expliquée: un système de rappels ("rappelle-moi") qui pourrait rappeler des choses comme "la prochaine fois que tu vois Sophie, ramène-lui son pull" -- même si on ne sait pas quand ni où on verra Sophie pour la prochaine fois.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could set a reminder somewhere so that you don’t forget to take your grandmother for a day in the mountains next time she comes to visit — even though you don’t know when that’s going to be?

Or if you had a way to remember to bring back Sophie’s sweater that she forgot at her place, next time you have a meeting in Geneva — but you have no trips planned to the city so far?

How about reminding you to wear woolly socks every time you take the plane, because it gets freezing cold once you’re up there? And your ear plugs, in case your seat neighbour is a heavy snorer?

We usually keep track of this kind of stuff in our heads. Or we have manual GTD-style lists — ever forgot to check them before meeting somebody, only to realize afterwards there was something written under their name?

There are existing systems that provide an inch or two of the solution, but nothing exists at this stage which actually does what I’m thinking of. Let’s go around some of these services, then I’ll share my ideas on how I think this can be done.

ifttt

This is, to be honest, the service that gave me my main inspiration. It has a trigger => action architecture, but so far triggers are limited to social media events. Some exceptions: the weather, for example. Possible task: “send me an SMS if it’s going to be cold tomorrow”.

But that weather example is pretty much an exception: ifttt triggers are present events. E-mail received. Post published. Tweet with #somehashtag found. Calendar event starts.

We would need triggers like “trip to Geneva planned in 24 hours” or “Grandma coming to Lausanne in 2 weeks” or even, if we pushed it further, “on the phone with James” or “checked in with Tania”. (More on the different types of trigger I’m thinking about later.)

My idea could be an extension of ifttt, but it might also be a separate service altogether. I’m not sure at this stage.

ZMS

ZMS has part of the solution: “next time I’m in Geneva station, remind me to get a croissant at the little coffee shop”. But that won’t be much help for remembering to take Sophie’s sweater with me next time I leave my house for Geneva.

Calendar reminders

Reminders are pretty standard in calendars. But you need to set them when you enter an event in your calendar. But the basic idea here is that an event in the future, as recorded by your calendar, triggers a reminder in the present. “One month before any trip to India, remind me to ask people what they want me to bring back.”

Evernote

For some reason I spoke about this idea when I stopped by the Evernote booth at LeWeb. After discussion, it didn’t really seem to be their space, but one thing they do well is capture information from all sorts of different sources and in all shapes and sizes and help you organize it. Text on photos is parsed, everything is tagged and geolocated, and available whether you’re on your phone, your tablet, your own computer or somebody else’s. It has this “central nervous system” touch to it that my reminder service would need.

Also, somebody suggested storing my rules/reminders in Evernote, using tags for triggers. #gotoGeneva, for example. Or #Grandma. But that won’t work, because I’m not going to be actively checking for triggers each time I go somewhere or meet somebody or do something. This is clearly a service which needs to work with push, and not pull. The whole point of it is that it will do the pushing for us.

Dopplr

Based on your calendar of future trips and your connections, Dopplr lets you know if you’re going to bump into people you know when you travel.

TripIt

One thing that TripIt has been doing for a long time and which I think is really cool is that you can forward your flight booking confirmation e-mails to it, and it will automatically parse them and enter the corresponding trip in your itinerary. Some people might find this creepy, but it’s a great way to painlessly transition information from one bucket (inbox) to another (calendar).

Path

Path monitors where you are, and when you change cities, makes a note in your Path. I feel there is more intelligence coming our way from Path, but let’s wait and see. What’s interesting is that as it’s limited to (reasonably) close friends, a service like this can learn a lot about the dynamics with the people you interact with the most. This could come in handy…

Siri

Speech recognition. “Remind me to buy flowers tomorrow.” One step further: “Next time I go to Geneva, remind me to take Sophie’s sweater with me.”

How would this be done?

The service would have two main layers:

  1. gathering data to build an “implicit calendar” of your future activities
  2. rule storage and triggering

I think the second layer is pretty “straightforward”. Store rules in an “if then” format like ifttt does very well, with the extra twist that the triggers will probably look something like “N days/hours/minutes before X”. We can also get fancy about how the rule is input (from code-like to Siri-like) and how the reminder (action) takes shape.

The part that sounds a bit like SF is “how will the system know my Grandma is coming to visit?” What are the sources to generate this intelligent calendar of my future activities? Here’s what I can imagine:

  • your normal calendar (it has attendee and location fields already, that’s a pretty good start)
  • your e-mails: either explicitly (you forward e-mails with relevant parsable information to the engine) or implicitly (the engine monitors your e-mail for things like travel reservations, conversations about future activities that it might recognize — yes, people will find this creepy)
  • geolocation: where you are, where your contacts are
  • and a step further: who you’re on the phone with, who you are exchanging text messages with, parsing content of your chats and text messages (people will find it even more creepy, but aren’t organisations already monitoring this kind of thing, without us benefitting from it?)

If I were doing this thing, I would start tame and simple, by gathering information from the calendar. I would focus on one type of reminder to start with. Here are the types of reminders that I can think of, off the top of my head:

  • meeting somebody
  • going somewhere
  • doing a certain activity
  • combinations: meeting somebody somewhere (e.g. Grandma in Lausanne)

Two obvious ones are the two first ones: I could set rules for when I’ve planned to see somebody, and when I’ve planned to go somewhere. Then, once that is working, widen the trigger set, the rule set, and the scope of the input engine.

When I pitched this idea at Lausanne StartupWeekend, I was surprised by some of the feedback I got: either people misunderstood and assumed it was already possible (“but such-and-such service already does geolocalized alerts! you can do this with Evernote or RememberTheMilk“), or understood but wrote it off as science fiction. This made me realize that this idea isn’t as easy to get across as I assumed it was, but that when people do understand it, they go “oh that would be useful”.

So, this is my attempt at explaining this idea correctly, maybe in more detail. I’d like to thank all the people I’ve talked about this idea with up to now (including ZMS and Evernote with whom I had brief chats) for helping me refine the way I present it. (Somebody in particular said “oh, a kind of intelligent calendar” — but I can’t remember who… sorry.)

Do you have questions or comments? Does this explanation sound clear to you? Would you explain it differently? I’d love to hear back from you if you’ve read this article to the end.

Blogging in the Morning: Lift12, 3615, StartupWeekend [en]

Here we go again. Inspired by one of my good friends who has been working in her studio in the morning and doing paid work in the afternoon, I’m going to have another go at “blog in the morning”.

I have, as always, a ton of things I want to write about. This post will be random.

I spent three days at Lift conference last week. For those of you who have never been to Lift, you must put it on your calendar for next year. Buy the tickets in the summer, so you get the early-early bird price. Lift is a wonderful conference. The talks are fascinating, the atmosphere is relaxed and friendly, the fondue is awesome.

I live-blogged the conference, like I do each year. I’m never happy with the job I do as a live-blogger (I always think others like Adam or Suw do a way better job than I do), but I’ve come to accept that live-blogging is gift not that many people have, and that I’m good enough at it to do a decent job of it and deserve my pass year after year (until now, at least).

Speaking of Lift, Lift’s founder Laurent Haug has started a podcast/show I haven’t yet had time to catch up with (I’m dying to) called 3615 (reference to old French Minitel codes). It’s in French. I think it’s great that it’s in French. What’s it about? It basically calls itself “3615, the show that wonders if the 21st century is a good idea or not”. Neat.

Lift this year properly lifted me ;-). I feel excited about technology again: 3D printing for example, I’m actually very tempted to order a RepRap kit and build one for eclau. Or robots.

I’ve decided to take part in the next Lausanne StartupWeekend. It’s this coming week-end! There are still a few open spots if you want to sign up, by the way. Julien Dorra is the guilty one: his talk made me realize I’d love to take part in the kind of events he was talking about. Actually, I’ve been inspired more than once to organize hack-dayish events: Website Pro Day, World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day, and more recently (still at the idea stage) “important but not urgent” days for eclau. Basically, “let’s get together and do stuff”. I also find Addict Lab fascinating, even though I still (after a lunch with Jan) can’t quite wrap my brain completely around it.

I like playing with ideas and doing a variety of things. Maybe putting myself in the kind of context StartupWeekend offers will also help me understand better what it is that I do. Plus, it’s going to be great fun.

So, anyway, I’m going to StartupWeekend. I even have an idea to pitch (I think). Who else is coming?

While I’m rambling on about Lift, one major take-away for me was the idea that information overload is part of the human condition. Go read my notes of Anaïs Saint-Jude’s talk, and once the video is online, listen to it. Well, listen to the whole Lift conference, actually. That’s what week-ends are for!

There is a whole lot more to say about Lift (3 days, folks!) but I’ll stop here. I feel like reading through my notes again, I have to say. Live-blogging, even if it’s not particularly difficult for me, requires a lot of concentration (it’s tiring) and it does mean I suffer a little from the post-effort brainwash syndrome. You know, like how after an exam you can’t remember a thing you wrote? That.

As for the other stuff I want to write about… let’s keep some for these coming mornings, OK?

Losing Credit [en]

[fr] De plus en plus, quand je partage un article intéressant sur Twitter ou Facebook, j'ai complètement perdu la trace de comment j'y suis arrivé. Ça m'embête, parce que je trouve important de donner un "retour d'ascenseur" (si petit soit-il) à ceux qui enrichissent mes lectures.

I have about 20 tabs open in Chrome with articles to read. And then, I have a scary number of links stacked away in Instapaper and (OMG how will I retrieve them all) many more in my Twitter favorites.

My sources for reading this day? My facebook news stream, Twitter, Tumblr, the odd e-mail from my Dad (he’s the one who pointed me to the BBC piece on the Ugly Indians of Bangalore — check out my post about them — amongst other things). I’ve signed up for Summify and though I have barely set it up, I find good reading in the daily e-mail summary it sends me. I can also see that Flipboard is going to become a source of choice for me once I’m back in Switzerland and have normal data access on my phone. And of course, once I’m reading an article, I click interesting links in it and often find other interesting articles in the traditional “related” links at the end.

Once I’m reading an article, I post snippets I find relevant to Digital Crumble, and depending on how interesting the article is, post it to Twitter, Facebook, or Climb to the Stars.

Why am I telling you all this?

I believe it’s important to give credit to those who point me to stuff interesting enough that I want to point others to it. The traditional “hat tip” or “via” mention. But I’m finding it more and more difficult to remember how I got to a particular page or article. Actually, most of the time, by the time I’m ready to reshare something, I have no clue how I arrived there.

This happened in the good old days of blogging as only king of online self-expression, of course, but less, I think. Our sources were more limited. Concentrated in one place, the aggregator. Shared by less people, in a more “personal” way (how much personal expression is there in tweet that merely states the title of an article and gives you the link?). When I click an article in my Facebook newsfeed, I don’t often pay attention to who shared it. It’s just there.

So, I wish my open tabs had some way of remembering where they came from. That, actually, is one of the reasons I like using Twitter on my phone, because the links are opened in the same application, and when I go back I see exactly which tweet I clicked the link from. Sadly, sharing snippets to Tumblr (something that’s important to me) does not exactly work well inside the mobile Twitter app.

Is anybody working on this? Is this an issue you care about too? I’d love to hear about it.

Mais qu'est-ce qui se passe? [fr]

[en] What makes the blogger fall off the wagon? Stress. Nothing bad, just a lot of things to deal with right now. Will be back soon!

C’est fragile, la routine. Vous bloguez tous les jours pendant un moment, et paf!, quelque chose vous fait tomber du train.

Quelque chose?

Le stress.

Eh oui, c’est tout bête. Il se passe un truc pas prévu, le stress grimpe, les articles ne s’écrivent pas.

Pas pour rien que ma mission pour 2012 s’intitule “moins de travail, plus de temps pour faire mes trucs”.

Bref, tout va bien, je suis un peu prise dans le tourbillon des choses à boucler (les valises ça attendra la semaine prochaine) avant de partir en Inde pour six semaines.

Bientôt des articles ici, de nouveau. Promis. Mais oui.

Linkball for a Sunday Night [en]

[fr] Un peu de lecture pour dimanche soir.

Boundaries and Outsourcing Our Brains [en]

[fr] Réflexion sur le fait que notre utilisation de la technologie consiste à déléguer certaines fonctions cérébrales (calcul, mais aussi stockage/mémoire), et sur la nécessité de chercher un équilibre dans notre connectivité en posant des limites, sans pour autant fuir dans la déconnexion complète.

I went to a lovely dinner party the other night, put together by the no-less-lovely Cathy Brooks of DoAT. At some point of the evening, we shared our thoughts on what we were seeing that qualified as “most disruptive”. Where are things going, according to the diners?

I have to admit I drew a bit of a blank in the “disruptive” department — I’m trying to quieten down these days. However, there are two things I see going on that seem important to me.

The first is that we’re outsourcing our brains. It’s an evidence — a huge amount of what computing does for us is that. The internet, mobile phones, better interfaces — all that accelerates and facilitates the process.

We don’t just use machines to outsource long complicated mathematical calculations anymore. We use them to decide where to eat. To remember what we need to do tomorrow. To know who acted in which movie. Where we met people, and when. Who they are and what they do. What we did when and where.

We’re using machines to remember stuff. Does it scare you? It doesn’t scare me that much, to be honest, because as long as that information is almost instantly available to us, does it make a big difference if it was stored in our brains or elsewhere? Have you read those SF books (like Alastair Reynolds‘s Revelation Space series — I love his stories) where humans have implants that connect them permanently to a kind of “cloud” or “network”? I mean, it’s just what we have now, with a better interface. I think we’re getting there.

We’ve been doing this with people forever. When you have a close relationship with somebody, you outsource (or delegate) some of your cognitive processes or data storage to them. I can’t remember if I read about this in Blink or The Tipping Point, but it was Malcolm Gladwell who introduced me to the idea.

In a couple, somebody is often in charge of the schedule. Or of cooking. Or of taking initiative for the holidays. Or of keeping up with movies to see. Breaking up (or losing that important other in any way) is traumatizing also because of the “data loss”. It’s a slightly utilitarian and mechanical view of relationships, of course, but it’s onto something.

The feeling of disconnect we have when away from technology (almost like a missing limb) has some kinship with the feeling of lack of access when we’re aware from our external data storage humans. “Oh, if only Andy were here, I’d just ask him X/he’d know what to do.”

Right, enough of confusing humans with machines.

The second thing that’s been on the top of my mind for the last couple of years is the question of boundaries. In an always-connected world, providing better and better interfaces with all the data out there and the spaces we store it in (machine or human), we are forced to learn boundaries. Boundaries with humans, especially when there are too many of them, and boundaries with technology.

For many of us, technology is closely linked to work, and learning to be offline is also learning to disconnect from work. Should we learn to be offline? Is it something we need? It seems obvious to us today, but I’m not sure it will be seen as that important in 10-20 years.

Do we think it’s important to spend days without electricity? Without cars (yes, but once a year)? Without cooking food? Without a roof over our head? Without newspapers or books? It’s different, you’ll say. Not that different — just that those are technologies that were born before us, and we don’t question them as much as those that appear during our adult lifetime.

Disconnecting is a radical way of avoiding the issue of having to set boundaries with technology and people. But we do not owe it to people to be available when they try to reach us. In most of our lines of work, nobody is going to die if we don’t check our e-mail. We can learn to say no, to not respond to certain requests, to not pick up the phone.

Of course we need disconnection at times. E-mail sabbaticals should become an acceptable thing in companies. For that, we need more people who have the guts to do it (responsibly of course). I found that spending a week offline helps reset normalcy. It’s easier to resist the temptation to check your e-mail first thing in the morning when you’ve spent a week without it. It’s easier to slow down when you’ve been offline for a week. I think it’s particularly useful to take these breaks when “online” and “work” are related. In a way, it just comes down to taking a “real” holiday. Just as needing time off work doesn’t mean we should aim to purge work from our lives, needing breaks from tech doesn’t mean we need to try and remove it from our lives.

I believe it is possible to remain connected and at the same time to preserve our personal space and time. Yes, that requires being able to say no, and set boundaries, but that’s simply healthy human behaviour.

Answering when addressed is etiquette that holds in a world where the physicality of space and time already sets boundaries for us — in the digital world, it needs to be rethought.

I remember this researcher who was interviewed in a Radiolab episode (probably “Deception“). He strived to not lie — you know, those social lies you say all the time. “Oh, sorry I can’t meet you for dinner next week, I’m too busy.” Instead, he would say things like (quoting from memory) “I’m sorry, but I’m not actually looking to pursue new friendships right now.” I think this kind of attitude requires courage and diplomacy. And I think that more and more, we’re going to have to learn it.

In a connected world, these social lies become more difficult. I might end up having to own up to the fact that yes, I’m there, at home, watching a DVD, available for my friends and family, but not for my clients. It’s not easy, but it’s doable.

So, I think we should go for balance, and boundaries, rather than rejection and disconnection.

Du désengouement pour les réseaux sociaux (et tout le reste) [fr]

[en] Social media losing speed? Nope, it's just normal that after a few months or years of using a new toy intensely, many people move on. To a new, similar toy or a completely different one.

Je lis un article (parmi bien d’autres) dans lequel on réfléchit aux causes d’un certain essoufflement dans l’usage des réseaux sociaux.

Pour moi, on est à côté de la plaque avec ce genre de questions.

Ce n’est pas une problématique liée aux réseaux sociaux. Ça a à voir avec la façon dont la nouveauté nous stimule. On est sur la bonne piste avec les lamentations concernant les “effets de mode”, mais on trivialise la problématique en l’étiquetant ainsi. Parce que ce n’est pas juste que nous sommes de superficiels moutons victimes de la mode. Il s’agit de la façon dont fonctionne nos cerveaux d’animaux humains — et on n’y échappe pas.

J’ai beaucoup réfléchi récemment au lien entre la nouveauté et l’efficacité d’une méthode ou d’une stratégie. J’en ai compris l’importance capitale en lisant The How of Happiness — dans le contexte des activités qui nous rendent heureux (on sait tous que trop de routine crée l’ennui, et que le bonheur ne se trouve pas dans l’ennui, n’est-ce pas?) — mais je vois depuis ce même phénomène à l’oeuvre dans une multitude de domaines.

Voici l’exemple qui m’a marqué. L’équipe de recherche de Sonja Lyubomirsky, l’auteur du livre, avait démontré que prendre régulièrement du temps pour sentir ou exprimer de la reconnaissance rendait les gens plus heureux. Les chercheurs se sont ensuite attelés à identifier la meilleure façon de sentir ou d’exprimer cette reconnaissance.

L’expérience est assez simple. On sépare les sujets de l’expérience en deux groupes, qui prendront une demi-heure pour mettre par écrit ce pour quoi ils sont reconnaissants:

  • le premier groupe le fera chaque dimanche soir
  • le deuxième groupe chaque lundi, mercredi, vendredi.

On regarde ensuite dans quel groupe le bonheur des gens a le plus augmenté après l’expérience.

Contrairement à ce qu’on pourrait attendre, c’est la méthode du premier groupe (une seule fois par semaine) qui est la plus efficace. Mais pourquoi donc? On suppose qu’à faire l’exercice trois fois par semaine, un phénomène d’habituation intervient

L’habituation, c’est ce qui fait que même après un terrible accident ou le décès d’un être cher, on finit par retrouve le goût de vivre, une nouvelle normalité. C’est assez sain, en fin de compte. Mais ça a ses inconvénients: les changements positifs dans notre vie subissent le même sort (leur effet s’atténue assez vite avec le temps).

Mais quand on y pense, ça explique beaucoup de choses. En particulier, ça explique pourquoi quand on croit avoir trouvé la solution à un problème qui nous enquiquine, ça marche souvent au début, mais assez vite, ça ne marche plus. Si vous êtes comme moi, vous avez peut-être essayé toute une série de méthodes pour mieux vous organiser ou mieux gérer votre temps ou votre argent ou votre poids ou votre efficacité ou… A chaque fois, on croit enfin avoir trouvé “ce qui marche”, pour déchanter quelques semaines ou mois plus tard, quand on se retrouve “immunisé” contre la solution magique qu’on croyait avoir trouvée.

Sommes-nous donc condamnés à chercher “toujours une meilleure solution”, à courir derrière la nouveauté? Pas nécessairement, mais il faut avoir conscience que pour tenir sur la durée, il faut introduire de la variété. L’exemple bateau et que tout le monde connaît, c’est celui du couple. Si vous voulez que ça dure, il faut (entre autres) éviter de sombrer dans la routine. Certes, on a des habitudes, mais celles-ci peuvent évoluer au fil du temps, et on peut chercher aussi à garder de la fraîcheur à la relation en y introduisant de la nouveauté.

Pourquoi je vous raconte tout ça?

Parce que je crois que les réseaux sociaux ne font pas exception. Ce sont des outils, qui servent à ceux qui les utilisent. Pour communiquer avec certaines personnes, s’exprimer, s’informer, “être ensemble”. A un certain niveau, ils sont donc une “solution” à “quelque chose” (que je n’appellerai pas nécessairement un “problème” — mais ils jouent un rôle). Aussi, ce sont des outils que l’on utilise souvent quotidiennement ou presque. Il est normal qu’une certaine routine s’installe, une fois passée la phase de découverte, l’arrivée des gens de notre entourage, l’excitation liée à l’arrivée de nouvelles fonctionnalités.

Il est donc parfaitement normal que ces outils perdent de leur attrait à un certain point. On s’y habitue. Ils deviennent du coup moins efficaces à remplir leur rôle pour nous — même si c’est un rôle social ou d’information. On connaît déjà ça, hors ligne. On a des “phases”. Pendant un an ou deux, on va régulièrement au même bar. Puis on s’en fatigue, et on va ailleurs. Ou bien on lit un magazine religieusement, ou on regarde une émission télé, et un jour on réalise qu’on a passé à autre chose. On voit certains amis beaucoup, plus plus du tout. Ainsi va la vie.

Les choses qui durent sont une exception. Et si on regarde de près, peut-être bien que dans ces choses qui durent, il y a plus de variété qu’il n’y semble à premier abord (je pense aux feuilletons télé: leur contenu est fait pour nous stimuler constamment en nous assaillant de rebondissements, imprévus et nouveaux personnages).

Les gens se lassent de Facebook? Mais bien sûr. C’est “normal”, Facebook, maintenant. L’e-mail, c’est normal, ça n’émerveille plus personne (enfin par ici). Internet aussi, sauf pour ceux qui le découvrent. Facebook et Twitter, aussi. Les blogs, je n’en parle même pas. On s’enthousiasme pour le nouveau, le différent, et pas pour le normal. C’est ainsi que notre cerveau est conçu. On n’y échappe pas.

Les outils sociaux, nouveaux par essence lors de leur apparition, se trouvent rapidement pris dans une course effrénée aux nouvelles fonctionnalités, pour maintenir justement ce sentiment de nouveauté et de fraîcheur innovatrice — cela d’autant plus, à mon avis, que les premiers utilisateurs sont en général encore plus sensibles que la majorité à cet attrait de la nouveauté (et à la lassitude qui accompagne le connu).

A m’entendre, vous pourriez penser que je ne vois pas de problème dans notre société sur-saturée de stimulations, qui nous distribue du nouveau comme de la drogue. Alors oui, je dis que le neuf et la variété représente un attrait indéniable pour notre cerveau de mammifères, et qu’il faut l’accepter. Mais le problème avec une société qui nous en donne à manger à la petite cuillère, c’est que l’on ne développe peut-être pas suffisamment la capacité à générer de la nouveauté de nos vies nous-mêmes. On attend que la stimulation vienne de l’extérieur.

Se prendre la tête sur les raisons d’un “désengouement” pour les réseaux sociaux, c’est à mon avis l’expression d’une vision et d’une compréhension un peu réduites du monde et du fonctionnement de l’humain. Ça n’a rien à voir avec les réseaux sociaux. Ça a à voir avec les humains.

Bien sûr qu’après un pic d’enthousiasme pour quelque chose, il faut s’attendre à une baisse d’utilisation. Rien de nouveau sous le soleil, passez votre chemin!

Links in New Windows: Websites vs. Applications [en]

[fr] En 2011, c'est toujours pas bien de forcer les liens à ouvrir dans une nouvelle fenêtre. Sauf, on peut l'admettre, quand votre site est en fait une application web.

I was surprised recently to realize that in 2011, it wasn’t obvious to everybody that forcing links to open in a new window (with target="_blank") was not a good idea.

Actually, there are quite a few high-profile sites which force links to open in new windows, and I realized I actually don’t mind it that much: Twitter is one. I like that when I click on a link in Twitter, it opens in a new tab. I’ve learned that Twitter does this, and I now rely on it.

So, maybe links in new windows aren’t always a bad thing?

Here’s what I think: if your “site” is in fact an application, then it doesn’t matter much. People will learn to use the interface of your web application, and if links open in new windows, they will discover that and (hopefully) remember it. However, if your site is a real site, meaning it contains stuff that people are going to read, and that stuff might contain links to other stuff people might want to read or see, then it remains a Bad Thing.

Why is it a Bad Thing to force links to open in a new window (in your blog, for example)? Here’s the reasoning behind this.

  • Normal behavior is that links open in the same window.
  • When you force a link to open in a new window, you’re breaking that expectation — and there is no way to know, by looking at the link, that it’s going to spawn a new window.
  • Opening new windows is a user decision, not a website design decision. Windows are part of the browser, not the site.
  • A link can easily be opened in a new tab or window by holding down a modifier key before clicking on it (Cmd/Ctrl for example).
  • A link which is set to be opened in a new window cannot be opened in the same window if that’s what the reader would prefer.
  • Opening links in new windows may confuse the user (who might not notice the new window) and breaks the back button (to go back, you have to close the current window instead of hitting the back button — adding a different way to “go back”… more confusion).

Summary:

  • if your site is actually a web application, where links open is part of the application design, and forcing links to open in a new window can make sense in certain situations;
  • if your site is a “proper website” or a blog, don’t force links to open in a new window — where they open belongs to the way your reader chooses to use his browser, and not to the website design.

Measuring a Blog's Success: Visitors and Comments Don't Cut It [en]

[fr] Un blog, c'est un investissement à long terme. Six mois, un an au moins sans se poser de questions, avant d'essayer de voir si "ça marche" ou pas. Et ne mesurez pas son succès aux visiteurs et aux commentaires. Plutôt, trouvez un moyen plus qualitatif de mesurer les bénéfices que vous en retirez, en vous basant sur la raison pour laquelle vous tenez ce blog.

Interestingly, a large part of my work right now seems to revolved around blogging. I’m happy about that. I’ve been blogging for over 10 years now, and went I became self-employed mid-2006 the first “title” I used was “blogging consultant”. Because back then, it was about blogs (and maybe wikis, and maybe social software, but not “social media”).

Anyway, I digress.

What I want to point out is that if you start a blog, or your company starts a blog, it’s important to have realistic expectations about the kind of benefits you’ll reap, and when, and how to measure them.

Even in 2011, too many people imagine that if you’re doing a good job with your blog, it will translate into thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments within a few weeks.

No way.

Those blogs with thousands of visits per day and dozens of comments are edge-cases, and have probably been at it for longer than you have.

Blogs and comments are actually not a good way of measuring the success of a blog. Honestly, if your blog has a few hundred readers a day and you get a comment now and again, you’re doing fine.

To measure the success of your blog, you need to think back to the reason you’re doing it. What do you want to get out of it? Chances are that “having as many people as possible visit it” is not the reason you’re doing it.

Maybe you want to change the perception people have of you. Maybe you want to showcase certain things you’re doing. Maybe you want to attract a certain type of person — reader, writer, or contributor. Maybe it’s the “marketing budget” for your business. Maybe you want to share a passion. Maybe you want an outlet to express yourself.

There are many reasons to want a blog. And most of them are perfectly valid (one that’s not, most of the time: make money with it).

But don’t go around measuring readers and comments to judge your success just because they’re convenient numbers.

Maybe what you need to do is create a scrapbook of all the things people spontaneously say about your blog, online or off. Maybe you need to make a list of events or situations where your blog was an ice-breaker or opened doors for you.

That seems to make way more sense than counting visits and comments. I mean, if those are so important to make somebody happy, they can be gamed.

Blogging takes time. It takes time because it takes time to think, write, link, tag, categorize, illustrate, title, proof, and publish. It takes time to be creative, and if your ambition for your blog is to be more than a collection of breaking news, hot topics and catchy headlines, blogging is a creative job.

But blogging also takes time because it’s a long-term strategy. When blogging started being hot, there were these numbers flying around, telling us that the average blog on the web was 3 months old and had 3 articles (or something like that). People started blogging, and abandoned their blogs very quickly.

When starting a blog, I wouldn’t worry about if it’s working or not before at least six months or a year. People are in such a hurry nowadays. All this hype about real-time, the internet being a place of unprecedented speed, the acceleration of innovation, not to say the “overnight successes” we keep hearing about but which languished in obscurity for ages before coming to the light. And even if there are real “overnight sensations”, they are, as I said above, edge cases.

And your blog will not be an edge case.

Your blog can work fine and do its job, but it will not be an edge case.

Unless your blog is your product — and in this case you’re clearly in the media business, and not using your blog as a communication tool — it is not to be looked at as a service or product people are going to use everyday and flock to. Instead, it’s a collection of valuable, long-lasting, well-indexed information. It’s the expression of something. It colours who you are.

And that takes time — not just the time of labour, but the days and months flying by in the calendar, so that value can accumulate, and become valuable.

Let me sum up this long rambling post in a few points:

  • blogging is a long-term strategy: it will take many months or even years for you to see what benefits it’s actually bringing you
  • don’t obsess on visitors and comments; instead, focus on what is said about your blog, and the opportunities it brings, in terms of contacts, open doors, favorable dispositions (qualitative measurement rather than quantitative)