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.

Zemanta's Related Articles: Very Mixed Feelings [en]

Image representing Zemanta as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

For years now, I’ve been seeing my articles pop up on other blogs under Zemanta‘s related links. And for years, it has bothered me.

Actually, it’s a bit more subtle than that: it does not bother me at all that people list my articles under related links on their posts. It’s flattering. It’s linkage. I like it.

What bothers me is two things:

  1. the trackback “spam” that often accompanies such links
  2. the fact search engines do not differentiate between “real” in-content links and related links.

Somewhere in the middle of the first sentence of this article, I decided that if I was going to complain about Zemanta (though it’s not only “complain”, you’ll see — I said mixed feelings), I should at least install it and try it out. Being the old-school blogger I am, I hadn’t gone down that road yet, believe it or not.

To be honest, Zemanta is a blogger’s wet dream. No more hunting for that Facebook logo or an image to illustrate your post. No wonder most Big Blogs nowadays always have a picture handy! Zemanta crawls all over the place, comes back with a bag full of images, and lets you select the one you want. Ditto for links to services or brand names you mention. And ditto for other articles with related content that you might want to send your readers to check out.

Using Zemanta is not automatic, as they told me a few months ago when I complained to them about what I think of as the trackback spam issue. And indeed, as a blogger, I have to click on the Zemanta elements I want to include in my post.

So where is the problem?

The problem, for me, is that it does not mean the same thing if somebody actually takes the trouble to read my article, writes it into his post in context, or simply dumps it with a bunch of links at the end of his post because it had a nice title or sounded vaguely related to what he was writing about.

It cheapens the value of the link.

That semi-automatic link involves little or no effort, little or no research, no real endorsement. I’m ready to bet that most of the Zemanta related links bloggers put at the end of their posts are there because they look good, rather than because the blogger once read the article, remembered it, hunted it down again (or bookmarked it), and decided to link to it while writing.

With that in mind, sending trackbacks to these related articles is exactly the practice I frown upon in my recent post about Technorati, Tags, and Trackbacks. And in all honesty, I wouldn’t mind if they were systematically nofollow, or at least if blog search engines like IceRocket or Google Blog search learned to make the difference between in-content links and end-of-post semi-automatically-generated link dumps. (See my IceRocket search for CTTS and the Google Blog search one — and check out how many of those links come from Zemanta rather than human beings.)

Why am I so brutal about these related links?

I have no problem with the idea of listing related links to a blog post. I have no problem with automatic lists of related posts — I even use them here on Climb to the Stars. But c’mon, if we’re putting nofollow on comment author site links, we should also be putting nofollow on related links. Specially as I see, now I have installed Zemanta, how easy and noncommittal it is to include these related links.

Zemanta related articles preview

Look at this screenshot: I see a list of blog post titles related to what I’m writing. I can hover on one and see a text snippet, click on “read more” to quickly check it out (am I going to do anything more than “quickly check it out” if I’m writing a blog post and impatient to hit Publish?), and then simply click on the post title to add it to the end of my content under “related links”. Easy. Too easy! These links are not content-driven — unless you consider their presence in the Zemanta “related articles” is content-driven by Zemanta’s algorithm. But their choice is not driven by the fact the blogger values their content.

One thing I was told by Zemanta (IIRC) was that bloggers could choose to add nofollow to their related links. Actually, they can choose to add nofollow to all their Zemanta links. All-or-nothing. And honestly, the way it’s phrased, who would want to select that option?

Your Zemanta Preferences

(No way I’m going to tell Zemanta to mark all the links it creates for me as “objectionable”. No way.)

So, what are my thoughts now?

  • I like the idea of Zemanta as a content-enhancement support tool, I don’t want to trash it
  • it seems specially useful for images as far as I’m concerned (though I’m disappointed it didn’t pick up the two screenshots above from my stream when I uploaded them — had to add them manually)
  • I like my blog showing up in related links elsewhere, though I don’t give that much value to it, and I really don’t see it as a valuable source of traffic (my stats tell me that)
  • search engines and blog tools should make a distinction between “manual” links and automatic/semi-automatic links, particularly of the “related” kind
  • I don’t want to get trackbacks when somebody includes my blog in their related links: maybe Zemanta could provide a way for blog owners to record that preference? would there be a way for Zemanta to tell blog tools like WordPress “don’t send trackbacks or pingbacks for this or that link?”
  • the nofollow setting in Zemanta needs to be a little more subtle than all-or-nothing, and do away with the scary wording (“objectionable”, c’mon on)
  • and while we’re at it, is there a WordPress plugin which would allow me to “un-nofollow” links left on my blog by certain commenters? the honest-to-good human beings who do not spend their time trying to link-drop?

Note: in this post, I used Zemanta to link to… itself (in the first paragraph), add the logo top right, and that’s it. I’m going to keep it active for the few next posts though to see if I actually use it, other than just liking the idea.

A Mess of Facebook Pages, Groups, and Profiles (Part 1) [en]

[fr] 1er épisode de ma tentative de mettre un peu d'ordre dans mes Pages Facebook.

Facebook “Like” buttons are starting to spread and I think I’m going to add them around here. So, I’m wondering which “Facebook Like” WordPress plugin I should install, and also, trying to sort out the mess between my various pages, groups, and profile on Facebook.

I recently started importing Digital Crumble into my Facebook profile, a move I’m pretty happy about because it seems to be making my online wanderings more readily available to a bunch of personal friends of mine who interact with me online mainly via Facebook, Twitter and IM. But on the other hand, I wonder: am I drowning my Facebook presence in too much Digital Crumble?

I’m now wondering what feeds to import where on Facebook.

I’ve always been wary of sending my Twitter firehose into Facebook: not the same audience, and too much Twitter at times, to be honest.

Let’s start with what’s easy: Bagha. He’s got a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@bagha) which he doesn’t use much, and in his case I have no problem linking them. I’ve installed the Twitter Facebook app to do that. I tried to use MyFlickr to import Flickr photos of him, but it was such a pain in the neck (can’t figure out exactly how to use it, + timeouts) I gave up and am looking for another solution to import Bagha’s Flickr photos into his page. I’ve also imported CTTS posts mentioning Bagha (feed) into his articles (hmmm, maybe I should resurrect his Catster diary…).

Have to say, though, that Facebook is a pain in the neck: getting it to accept a feed takes multiple tries, and connecting apps like Twitter or MyFlickr to their respective external services is no walk in the park either. Be persistent!

Twitter Killed My Blog and Comments Killed Our Links [en]

I hope the provocative title grabbed your attention.

Let me say it straight out: my blog is not dead, neither are our links.

But I still have a point.

Twitter is IRC on steroids, for those of you who have already experienced the irresistable draw of a chatroom full of smart witty people, 24/7. Twitter is my very own IRC channel, where I do not have to hear those I do not care about. It’s less geeky than IRC, which means that many of my “online spaces” collide there.

It’s intoxicating. I love it. I can spend all day there.

But that’s not why I would provocatively say that it has killed my blog. Twitter is a content-sharing space, not just a super IRC channel. Found an interesting link? Five years ago, it would have morphed into a blog post, because that was pretty much the only way to share it. Nowadays, dump it in Twitter. Arrived safely at destination? Again, 5 years ago, blog post. Now, tweet.

New tools have an impact on how we use old tools. Sometimes we abandon them altogether, but most of the time, we just redefine the way we use them. This is what I was trying to explore in the first panel I ever moderated, at BlogTalk 2008 (crappy video).

So, no, Twitter did not kill my blog, but take a group of bloggers and give them Twitter accounts, and the temperature of the blogosphere changes. All the high-speed stuff moves to Twitter.

If you just look at the present, it’s no big deal. People are still connecting. That’s what all this social media/software is about, right? Connecting people. Online. But the problem with us spending all our time swimming in the real-time stream is that it’s just that, a real-time stream. Not much is left of it once it has passed.

Take this short piece about translation I wrote nearly 10 years ago. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s still there, as readable as it was when I wrote it. Had this taken place on Twitter, nothing much would be left of it. Gone with the wind, if I dare say.

Many many years ago when I first started blogging (can you tell I’m on a nostalgic streak?), blogs did not have comments. Hell, I barely even had permalinks when I started. Permalinks were the key, though: they allowed bloggers to link to each other’s writings.

And we did. Conversations would bounce from blog to blog. They weren’t chatty like on IM, IRC, or Twitter. They were blog-post-speed conversations. We would have to think (a little) before we wrote.

Even though comments are a wonderful invention and I would never want to take them back, they did ruin this, in a way. People started leaving comments all over the place and didn’t come back to their blogs to write about the conversations they were participating in. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited about coComment when it came out, or services like BackType (which also seems to have backed out of tracking comments one makes) or Disqus. (Aside: see, I’d love somebody to hire me to do some research and write a memo on the current state of the comment-tracking-sphere and all the players involved. I could totally see myself doing that.)

With comments came less of an incentive to link to each other on our blogs. With Twitter (and Facebook), less of an incentive to share certain things on our blogs, and also, less of an incentive to comment, as it became much easier to just “tweet a quickie” to the post author (therefore making our activity visible to all our followers). And with the death of Technorati tags (I’ll call it that), we bloggers are now connecting to each other on other social networks than the blogosphere.

I think it’s time to actively reclaim the blogosphere as our own, after leaving it for too long at the hands of marketing and PR.

Bloggers, it’s time to wake up! Write blog posts. Link to your fellow bloggers. Leave comments on their posts, or better, respond to them on your blogs.

We don’t have to abandon Twitter and Facebook — just remember that first and foremost, we are writers, and that “conversation” (though ’tis a wonderful thing) is not writing.

Don't You Tire of Real-Time? [en]

[fr] Tout ce temps réel sur le web me fatigue. On néglige les expressions plus profondes que permet le web, sur nos blogs par exemple.

I find that I’m increasingly tired with real-time. Keeping up with the stream. Living on the cutting-edge. I like diving into deeper explorations that require me to step out of the real-time stream of tweets and statuses and IRC and IM conversations.

I like reading and writing.

I’ve never been much of a “news” person — and I know that my little self and my little blog have no chance of competing with the Techcrunches and ReadWriteWebs and GigaOms that seem to be all over the place now.

Life is real-time enough. I like spending time on the web like in a book.

I still love Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and all the transient stuff that’s floating around — but sometimes I feel like I let myself get lost in it.

Once again, I’m back here, on my blog.

Idea: Working as a Freelance Researcher [en]

I had planned taking today off, but as I’m up to my neck in work I decided to spend it in the office instead. Result (don’t mess with yourself when you promise yourself time off): I’ve spent most of my morning down the blog-hole — reading a ton of interesting things online, particularly on Penelope Trunk’s blog. (Yeah, I know not everybody likes her, but I do. More on that another day, maybe.)

So, as I was reading blogs, sharing snippets on Tumblr and links on Twitter, I was thinking to myself: actually, one thing I’m pretty good at (and love doing) is finding and reading interesting stuff, thinking about it, and sharing all that with other people. (For those of you familiar with StrengthsFinder: my #1 is Input and my #2 is Communication — more about that another day, too.)

I pinged Suw on IM to see if she had any ideas how to “monetize” (still hate the word) this kind of activity. She suggested working as a researcher.

I like the idea. Need your homework done on something? I love learning about new stuff, I know how to search online, I have a great network, I’m smart (let’s say it), and I know how to write stuff up. Think of it, a lot of my popular blog posts are the result of me taking the plunge into a topic, learning about it, and reporting back. And for anything related to social media, I have the huge advantage of already knowing a lot.

This doesn’t mean I’d be giving up my current activities. But I’m getting increasingly frustrated that I don’t have time anymore to fool around online, research stuff, read more books, learn about this space we inhabit — online and offline.

Do you know anybody who works as an online researcher? Would you hire me as a researcher? (Not asking if you need my services as of now, but more “do you think I have the profile?”) If I decide to provide this kind of service, how might I go about to (a) decide what to charge (b) find gigs?

This is a very fresh idea for me, and I’d gladly welcome any thoughts you may have on the subject. As for me, I’m off to do some research on… freelance researchers :-).

A Story About Tags, and Technorati, and Trackbacks [en]

[fr] Une conversation sur Twitter au sujet des tags, de la grande époque de Technorati, et de où on en est maintenant. Ce qu'on a perdu: un "tagspace" commun pour la blogosphère (c'était ce qu'offrait Technorati...).

Yesterday I innocently answered a tweet about Technorati tags from Luis Suarez. This led to an interesting three-way conversation between Luis, Thomas Vander Wal. Ideas got tossed around, and we decided to continue the discussion through our blogs, as if it were 2003 (2001?) all over again. You know, I really miss the old blogging days, sometimes. But more about that in another post.

Now, before I get to the meat, I want to tell you a little about the history of tags and tagging. I was there, you see — and I’d like to tell you what I saw of history unfolding at the time, because it gives some background to the ideas that came up for me while chatting with Luis and Thomas.

(Note that I am absolutely not using the sacred inverted pyramid here. I’m not trying to optimize. I’m taking you for a ride, come along if you wish.)

A long long time ago, when the blogosphere was frisky and bloggers were still strange beasts, Movable Type invented the Trackback.

Trackbacks were exciting. You have to understand that at the time, comments on blogs were barely a couple of years old, and bloggers still had the good habit of carrying on conversations through their blogs, linking to each other’s articles like there was no tomorrow. Trackbacks allowed us bloggers to tell each other we were mentioning each other’s posts without having to “head over there and leave a comment” or rely on the linkee’s obsession with referrer monitoring (all our metrics and stats tools were much more primitive at the time, and we didn’t have Google Alerts).

Some people started sending trackbacks when their posts were simply related to posts on other blogs — an abusive practice, if you ask me, laying the grounds for what was to become trackback spam.

Enter TopicExchange. It doesn’t exist anymore, but I fell in love with it right away. TopicExchange was a site which hosted “channels”, keywords that you could trackback so that your post would appear in a given channel. TopicExchange was, in fact, a somewhat clumsy precursor of tagspaces. The idea was there, but it was built on trackbacks rather than microformats.

Roughly around that same period (of years), delicious started using tags to allow users to classify bookmarks. Flickr followed, and tagging started to take off.

In 2005, Technorati started tracking tags in blog posts it indexed, and the microformat for tagging was born. Days later, I’d released the first WordPress tagging plugin, Bunny’s Technorati Tags. Now, you may not care much about Technorati in 2010, but at the time, it was a Big Thing.

First of all, Technorati were the only ones indexing what they then called the “Live Web” (or was it the “Living Web”, I can’t remember). Forget Twitter, Facebook, and today’s real-time craziness: in 2005, blogs were pretty much the fastest form of publication around. Google Blogsearch didn’t exist. So, bloggers (and blogging software) would ping Technorati each time they published an article, Technorati would crawl their RSS feed and index their content. This meant you could search for stuff in blogs. Technorati indexed links between blog posts, so you could look up the “Technorati Cosmos” for any URL (ie, the collection of blog posts linking to it.)

If you were serious about blogging, you made sure you were in Technorati. And your properly tagged articles would appear on the corresponding Technorati tag page. (See where this meets TopicExchange?)

Second, and this is where in my opinion the Technorati implementation of “let’s group posts from different bloggers about a same topic on a single page somewhere” beats TopicExchange: it’s based on a microformat, technologically much simpler to implement than a trackback. Anybody who could write HTML could add tags. It also meant that other tools or companies could create their own tagspaces and index existing tags — which was not possible with a trackback-based implementation, as trackbacks are “pushed” to one specific recipient.

The blogosphere went wild with tags, and my brain started bubbling on the topic.

TopicExchange died, drowned under trackback spam.

And as far as I’m concerned, Technorati is dead (at least to me), probably drowned or crippled by splogs and tag spam.

Which leads me to express a law which I’ll call “Stephanie Booth’s Law of Death by Spam”, just in case nobody had thought of it before, and it catches on and makes me famous:

Sooner or later, all smart ideas to better connect people or ideas through technology drown in spam, unless the arms race to defeat it is taken seriously enough and given the ressources it needs.

Right, I think you have enough context now, and I can come back to the conversation that kept Luis, Thomas and I occupied for a bit last night. Luis was asking if anybody still cared about Technorati tags, and we drifted off (at least I did) on the Golden Days of Technorati (hence the slightly nostalgic storytelling that makes up the first big chunk of this post).

Clearly, Technorati is not playing the role it used to play for the blogosphere (whatever that is nowadays, the blogosphere I mean, now that every online publication is a “blog”).

There’s Icerocket, which actually does a not-too-bad job of letting you search for stuff over blog posts (check out my ego search and blog search). Actually, as I’m writing this, I’m discovering that their advanced search is pretty neat (though I’m not certain why this query returns nothing).

One issue I see with Icerocket is that you have to actively sign up and include tracking code on your blog — which means that less bloggers will go through the trouble of getting themselves indexed (and less spammers, of course, which is probably the idea, though I did spot a few splogs in my searches above). Another one is that it’s not very visible. Do you bloggers know about it? Have you registered? Does it bring you traffic? Technorati had cosmos and tag links that made it visible on the blogs it indexed (just as I tried to make TopicExchange more visible in my blog when I was using it).

Another more systemic issue is that a “blog” today and a “blog” in 2005 is not the same thing. Well, some are (I hope this one is), but nowadays we have all these big online publications that I call media-blogs: run as businesses, multi-author, revenue-stream… Their quality ranges from cheap content-factory to properly journalistic. Are they still blogs? In 2010, what is a blogger? What kind of blogs do I want to see indexed by a service like Icerocket — and is there some objective way to draw lines, or am I letting my personal bias take over? As you may know, my work around blogger accreditations for LeWeb has led me to ponder the lines between journalist, blogger, other-online-publisher. I don’t have answers yet.

But I digress.

When WordPress finally implemented proper tags, the default tagspace was not Technorati (as it had been with my plugin), but a tagspace local to the WordPress installation. This made sense in some way (probably by that time tag spam on Technorati was already taking its toll) — but we lost something precious in the process: a shared space where separate blogs and blog posts could collide over common topics.

I want that back. But maybe I don’t want a tagspace shared by the whole humungous somethingsphere of 2010. So, how about this?

Let’s imagine a tool/platform which allows a certain number of bloggers to gather together, as a group. You know all about groups, in their various incarnations: Flickr groups, Google groups, Facebook groups, new Facebook groups… What about blogger groups? I could gather a bunch of bloggers I know and like, and who know each other, and who tend to read each other, and we could decide to create a little blogosphere of our own. The group could be public, private, invitation-only, whatever.

And this group would have a shared tagspace.

If you’re starting from scratch, you’d do this with a multi-user WordPress implementation (go to WordPress.com for example: there is a shared tagspace for the blogs there). But here, imagine the bloggers in question already have blogs. Would there be no way to recreate this, independantly of which blogging tools they’re using?

This is similar but not identical to shared spaces like SxDSalon. SxDSalon slurps in all posts with a given tag from a list of bloggers. It’s nice, it works, it’s useful, but it’s not what I’m thinking of.

Planet is a cool tool too, but to my knowledge it only aggregates posts. Maybe we could add a shared tagspace to it?

I look forward to reading what Luis and Thomas will write on their blogs about our conversation. 😉 Blogs are alive! Twitter has not killed them!

Blogger/Podcaster Typology Survey: Please Contribute! [en]

[fr] J'essaie de mieux comprendre le profil des blogueurs et podcasteurs qui couvrent des conférences, en particulier le lien entre blog/podcast et revenu et le fonctionnement des blogs collectifs. Merci de bien vouloir prendre 5-10 minutes pour répondre à mon questionnaire. Attention, ceci est un sujet de recherche perso et non une demande d'accréditation pour LeWeb! Je vous parle du Web demain au plus tard.

In the last three years I’ve been working on blogger accreditations for LeWeb (and Web2.0 Expo Berlin before that) I have had ample time to think about how we define a “blogger” (or “podcaster”) in this context.

It used to be simple: a blogger was somebody who had a blog, and a podcaster somebody who had a podcast.

But nowadays, everybody who publishes stuff online is a blogger or a podcaster.

When an event accredits members of the press to attend, it’s pretty easy to figure out who to accredit and who not to: the press is institutionalized, its members are registered and work for this or that publication (freelancers or employees).

With bloggers, it’s much more fuzzy. Where is the line between “blogger” and “press”? (I thought I’d written about that already but I can’t dig out a blog post.) What are our criteria for deciding that somebody is eligible to come and cover the conference as an official blogger?

This is new territory, and as always with new territory, I’m constantly refining my thinking about these issues. One thing I’m trying to do in the process is better understand the link between blogging and work/income — and also, how collective publications function. To do this I’ve drawn up a little survey to try to understand the profiles of bloggers and podcasters who attend conferences and blog about them.

If you recognize yourself in this description (do you have a blog/podcast? have you attended a conference and blogged about it? you’re in) please take 5-10 minutes to help me out by filling in this survey.

This is not an application form for LeWeb’10! It’s personal research. I’m publishing a post about LeWeb’10 tomorrow at the latest. Thanks for your patience.

Loading…

Brain Downtime [en]

[fr] On a besoin de débrancher son cerveau -- avez-vous assez l'occasion de le faire?

My brain needs downtime. So does yours.

We’ve managed to make our lives so efficient that we’ve removed all the downtime that used to be part of them. We can work on the train, listen to podcasts while we clean and cook, why, we even read on our iPhones as we walk through town.

Sleeping just doesn’t cut it. Of course, we need sleep (that’s also body-downtime), but we need awake-downtime.

What’s your downtime?

For me, reading fiction and watching TV series qualify as brain downtime. My conscious mind is immersed in fiction, though I’m sure a lot is going on in the background. Sailing and judo qualify to, as does riding my exercise bike if I’m listening to music rather than a podcast.

When I’m on the bus and reading FML or flicking idly through my Twitter stream, is that brain downtime?

When I’m walking in the mountains, drinking a cup of tea on my balcony, watching the sun set, taking a bath, or meditating, that’s definitely brain downtime.

Do you get enough brain downtime?

Supports de cours: notre philosophie (formation MCMS) [fr]

[en] For the course I'm co-directing, we decided to make course materials available through the website instead of handing students a big fat file at the beginning of the course. Here's an explanation of why we're doing things this way.

J’ai publié sur le blog du cours MCMS une explication sur notre philosophie concernant les supports de cours. Je pense qu’il est intéressant de la reproduire ici.

Il est coutumier, lors d’une formation d’une certaine ampleur, de démarrer le premier jour avec la distribution d’un gros classeur bien lourd servant de support de cours.

Nous avons fait le pari de fonctionner différemment — pari qui n’est pas très difficile à faire, au fond, puisqu’il reflète par les actes la matière de cette formation: mettre les supports de cours à disposition des étudiants ici, sur ce site.

Premièrement, il s’agit d’une occasion de mettre un peu plus les « doigts dans le cambouis » et de se familiariser avec l’information numérique, et d’en découvrir les avantages. Parfois, c’est le support physique qui présente un avantage, et rien n’empêche dans ce cas d’imprimer le support numérique.

Deuxièmement, fonctionner ainsi nous permet plus de flexibilité et de réactivité. Dans le milieu des médias sociaux, tout bouge très vite, et préparer des mois à l’avance un support de cours imprimé au sujet de Facebook (par exemple) tient du suicide pédagogique — il y a de fortes chances qu’il soit en partie obsolète avant même d’être utilisé. Le support de cours numérique peut être maintenu à jour (et modifié) à tout moment et pour tous.

Troisièmement, nous sommes conscients que les supports de cours ainsi mis à disposition vont circuler, y compris en-dehors de notre public cible premier, les personnes inscrites au cours. Renonçant à un protectionnisme encore trop répandu (« c’est mon travail et je ne le partagerai pas! »), nous avons confiance d’une part que notre valeur en tant que formateurs n’est pas réductible à un support de cours, et d’autre part qu’en mettant à disposition de la communauté, nous recevrons en retour.

Chaque intervention fait donc l’objet d’un article dans ce blog, avec liens vers les supports de cours (ici ou parfois hébergés par l’intervenant lui-même), et parfois des notes prises lors du cours. Il est aussi possible à l’intervenant de publier directement dans ce blog, s’il le désire.

Quelques recommandations de lecture [fr]

[en] A bunch of books I recommend reading. Descriptions are in French, but titles are in English!

A l’occasion du premier module du cours MCMS au SAWI, j’ai brièvement présenté quelques livres qui me semblaient intéressants/pertinents aux participants. Je vous redonne la liste ici — un jour je ferai une page correcte avec mes recommandations de lecture, mais c’est un début!

Les liens sont vers Amazon.de parce que c’est par là qu’il faut passer en Suisse pour avoir les frais de port gratuits.

Naked Conversations: un livre qui commence à dater un peu mais qui reste néanmoins une splendide collection d’exemples d’utilisation des blogs (et des conversations en ligne) par des entreprises/organisation. Inspiration, exemples concrets, modèles à suivre (ou pas). [amazon.de]

The Long Tail: la longue traîne de Chris Anderson. Je ne l’ai personnellement pas encore lu (shhh, motus!) mais c’est une référence pour ce qui est de la diversification des marchés à l’heure d’internet. [amazon.de]

Drive: pas encore lu non plus (je l’ai commandé il y a peu), Drive est un livre sur ce qui motive les gens. J’ai parlé de Dan Pink dans Carotte et créativité ne font pas bon ménage et vous pouvez déjà regarder sa conférence TED en vidéo pour vous faire une idée. [amazon.de]

Predictably Irrational: ce livre, qui n’a de prime abord pas de lien direct avec les médias sociaux, fait partie de la catégorie « a changé ma façon de comprendre le monde ». On est fondamentalement manipulables, nos réactions sont irrationnelles même quand on les comprend. Qu’en faire? A lire absolument pour comprendre tout un tas de phénomènes qui sont en jeu dans le milieu « organique » en ligne. [amazon.de]

Everything is Miscellaneous: David Weinberger, co-auteur du Cluetrain Manifesto, explique comment s’organisent tous ces « objets numériques », dans un ordre qui va parfois à l’encontre de notre conception de ce qu’est l’organisation. Ils peuvent être à plusieurs endroits à la fois, comportent des méta-données sur lesquelles on peut effectuer des recherches, etc. Un ouvrage important pour comprendre les caractéristiques physiques du monde numérique. [amazon.de]

The Culture of Fear: un regard (un poil polémique et qui date un peu) sur le rôle des peurs collectives dans notre société. Il y a toujours quelque chose qui fait peur. A mon sens, ce livre est pertinent pour remettre en contexte toutes les peurs qui circulent autour des nouvelles technologies, internet, les médias sociaux, etc. [amazon.de]

The Myths of Innovation: huit idées préconçues sur l’innovation, exposés de manière claire avec plein d’anectodes à l’appui. (En résumé, Gutenberg ne s’est pas réveillé un matin en se disant « hmm, qu’est-ce que je vais faire aujourd’hui… Eurêka, je vais inventer l’imprimerie! ») [amazon.de]

L’âge de peer: un livre (en français!) sur la co-création et l’économie du monde du peer-to-peer (P2P). Le chapitre « nouveaux modèles économiques » et « nouveaux modèles de création »… [amazon.de]

We Are Smarter Than Me: utiliser en business le pouvoir de l’intelligence collective. Livre co-écrit en ligne avec une myriade de contributeurs. [amazon.de]