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.

Les réseaux sociaux ont-ils tué les blogs? [fr]

[en] Another one on the "are blogs dead?" meme. Nope, they're not. Surprise!

Réponse courte: non 🙂

Réponse plus longue: pas plus que les réseaux sociaux ont tué l’e-mail, et pas plus qu’internet a tué la télé (quoique…). Quand un nouveau média débarque, il force les anciens à se transformer. Mais de là à dire qu’il les tue… c’est un pas que je ne franchirai pas.

Une chose par contre est sûre: avec l’apparition de Twitter, de Facebook, et de quantité d’autres espaces qui nous permettent “d’exister en ligne”, nos activités de publication on ligne sont redistribuées sur ces différents canaux. Il y a 8 ans, lorsque je voyageais, je mettais un mot sur mon blog pour dire que j’étais bien arrivée. Aujourd’hui, j’utilise Twitter ou Facebook pour cela.

L’émission nouvo m’a interviewée il y a quelque temps pour “La fin des blogs?“, ce qui m’a donné un peu l’occasion de développer mon point de vue en vidéo (vous devez aller sur le site de nouvo pour la regarder, impossible de faire un embed, dommage). Cette discussion a aussi alimenté mon article Paid vs. Free, sur le coût du contenu et les différentes façons (bonnes et moins bonnes) de le monétiser.

Revenons-en aux blogs et à leur prétendue mort ou fin. D’abord, ça fait des années que le thème fait régulièrement surface. En tous cas quatre ou cinq ans, à vue de pif. Et les blogs sont toujours là. On aimerait bien pouvoir dire que les blogs c’est fini, parce qu’alors cela confirmerait qu’ils n’étaient qu’une mode, et non pas une des manifestations de la transformation fondamentale qu’amène internet en matière de publication et de communication — transformation d’ailleurs très menaçante pour les médias traditionnels confortablement en place (enfin, plus si confortablement, justement).

“Les blogs”, ça couvre une variété de formes d’expression dont on ne peut pas toujours aisément parler, à mon avis, en les mettant dans le même panier. Faut-il le rappeler, le blog est avant tout un format de publication. Côté contenu, on peut en faire un tas de choses (les résultats sont plus ou moins heureux). Un blog-journal n’est pas la même chose qu’un blog-roman ou un blog-réflexion ou un blog-politique ou un blog-veille-technologique ou un blog-essai ou un blog-photos ou un blog-voyage. Vous me suivez? Clairement, le skyblog, blog adolescent francophone typique des années 2004-2006, sur lequel on met photos de soi, des ses amis, de son boguet, poèmes ou autres choses glânées en ligne, est avantageusement remplacé par Facebook, qui a l’avantage de ne pas être autant sur la place publique.

En dix ans, mon blog a évolué. Mais il y a d’autres facteurs que l’apparition des réseaux sociaux qui ont joué là-dedans, que diable! On parle de dix ans, quand même! J’ai passé d’étudiante fraîchement rentrée d’une année en Inde à indépendante-experte au rayonnement international (ça sonne bien ça, je vais oublier une seconde qu’il s’agit de moi et laisser ça), transitant par deux employeurs différents en chemin. J’ai changé! C’est normal que mon blog ait changé aussi, vous ne trouvez pas?

Bon, je vais me taire, parce que je crois que c’est une question relativement peu excitante où la réponse ne fait pas grande surprise. Début 2008, j’avais d’ailleurs proposé (et animé) une table ronde là autour lors de BlogTalk 2008 à Cork, en Irlande: comment l’apparition de nouvelles technologies (Twitter en particulier) change notre façon d’utiliser les anciennes (le blog). Vous pouvez regarder la super mauvaise vidéo de l’histoire (en anglais, sous-exposé, audio pas top, début et fin coupés…) si ça vous chante.

Et là, je vais retourner écrire un autre article pour mon blog moribond :-p

Four Lazy WordPress Plugin Desires [en]

[fr] Quatre idées de plugins WordPress que j'utiliserais s'ils existaient.

Dear Lazyweb,

Here are a few WordPress plugins I’d love to use, if they existed.

  • hreflang: I’ve come to love the visual editor in WordPress (after years of hating it with a passion). The only thing I regret is that if I want to add hreflang attributes to my links, I have to go over and edit them in HTML. So I don’t do it. The little pop-up to add a URL has fields for title, target (blergh!) and class, so it shouldn’t be too hard to write a plugin that adds an hreflang field, should it?
  • unpaginate: I’ve always had mixed feelings about pagination. On the blog home page, it’s great, as it allows you to simply “read more”. On very long pages, it’s also good, because it allows you to not have to wait a whole year for the page to load. But often, if I’m on a monthly or category archive page, I’d like to be able to load all the posts belonging to that month or category so I can do a quick text search on it for something I’m looking for. What would be lovely would be a plugin that adds an “unpaginate” link at the bottom of the page (near “previous”). Upon clicking that link, the reader would be taken to an “all the posts” page with no pagination. This could be an option of the next plugin I’m going to describe.
  • post lists: I like it when blogs display full posts on their pages, but I know that in some cases it’s more practical to see a list of titles with excerpts, or even just a list of titles. This plugin would make WordPress generate list and excerpt pages for any existing URL in the system: 2009/12/list/ or tags/twitter/excerpt or category/writing/partial. These pages should not be paginated, I think (so the unpaginate plugin described above could be an option for this plugin, as the code to do it should already be included). Maybe a little admin panel to set the URL schemes and activate various options would be cool.
  • Tagul tag cloud: simple one! Give all the tags of the blog to Tagul to eat, and display the pretty tag cloud on the tags/ page. Bonus for tag clouds by month, category, and… tag.

That should keep you busy if you were looking for a little WordPress plugin coding project! Am happy to give more precise information if some kind soul is willing to give one of these a try. Fame and fortune (well, maybe not fortune) await you!

Another Video: Relevance and Curation of the Real-Time Web [en]

[fr] Une autre vidéo de moi en train d'essayer désespérément de dire quelque chose d'intelligent en réponse à des questions perplexantes, avec un cerveau grillé.

Also last December, I was interviewed by Cathy Brooks about relevance and curation of the real-time stream. In the Paris Metro, this time!

So if you enjoy watching me struggle on video while trying to answer questions, knock yourself out 🙂

Disclaimer: I was exhausted and my brain was fried — actually, we all were… see if you can spot Dana at the beginning of the video (it was during LeWeb’09).

(By the way, am I missing something, or has it become impossible to embed a YouTube video under 500 pixels wide? My layout only fits 500px, as you can see…)

Where Does Tumblr Fit in? [en]

[fr] Tumblr est un outil génial pour rassembler et republier les choses sympa que l'on trouve en ligne, agrémenté d'un réseau social à la Twitter (non-réciproque) qui nous permet de suivre sans difficultés les publications des personnes qui nous intéressent.

Last night on the way home, I was telling a friend about Tumblr. I have a blog there, Digital Crumble, and really really like using it. Many of my friends do not use Tumblr, and I realize that some explaining is not useless.

Tumblr is great as a scrapbook (scrapblog!) of content seen online. Not to say it can’t be used for original content, but that’s not where it shines (in my opinion) and I personally hardly ever put original content in Digital Crumble.

For me, Tumblr is somewhere between Twitter, Buzz, and WordPress.

One reason many people do not get Tumblr is that until you get an account, you do not know about the dashboard. The dashboard is the Tumblr equivalent to the Twitter stream. It is a neverending page of posts by people you have chosen to follow. That’s the big difference between Tumblr as a blogging tool and WordPress: Tumblr is really built around the following/being followed dynamic of Twitter and Buzz.

Here are two zoomed-out shots of parts of my dashboard page so you can see what it looks like:

Tumblr Dashboard Tumblr Dashboard

Two things make Tumblr great for collecting non-original content:

  • the “reblog” button on each post in the dashboard
  • the bookmarklet.

If you’re familiar with Twitter, the “reblog” button is like Twitter’s “retweet” button (but the Tumblr reblog button was there way before Twitter’s retweet one). See something you like in your dashboard? You can “like” it, of course, but in a click of the mouse you can reblog it, publishing it to your tumblelog and pushing it along to your followers. A lot of the content in Tumblr is visual (photographs, design, videos…) — which is pretty cool.

When you stumble upon something interesting online, you can hit the Tumblr bookmarklet, and a pop-up window allowing you to instantly publish what you’ve found to your tumblelog appears. Tumblr makes a guess as to the nature of the content, too: video, link, quote, photo. Hit publish, and get on with your browsing. Tumblr takes care of the rest — including a link to the original source.

Share on Tumblr

A lot of the things I post to Digital Crumble come from the people I’m following on Tumblr. Aside from that, I also reblog a lot of quotes from things I read online. If I’m reading something interesting, I have just to highlight the paragraph I want to save/quote, hit the bookmarklet, hit publish, and it’s on Digital Crumble. Let’s say it’s the web 2.0 equivalent of when I was a student and painstakingly copied out quotes and paragraphs from books I was reading into a small notebook. 😉 (Here’s an example of a recent quote I captured like that.)

What makes this all the more precious is that you can afterwards easily search through your Tumblr Dashboard or your own postings to bring up snippets you’ve saved. When I’m doing online research for a blog post or article, I’ll stick all the interesting snippets in Tumblr, which means I then have them handy (with link to the source!) when I’m writing up.

Finally, what I like about Tumblr is the playfulness of the community. It’s fun. It doesn’t feel too serious, or like the geek/intelligentsia quarters. I think that for non-bloggers who do spend time online reading and browsing without feeling the urge to crank out pages and pages of original writing, it’s a great publication platform to start with.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

Seth Godin on Benefits of the Blogging Process [en]

[fr] A force de se concentrer sur les bénéfices qu'il y a à avoir un blog (= des articles publiés), on perd de vue les bénéfices du simple acte de bloguer -- de l'utilité pour soi de cet exercice d'écriture.

Take 90 seconds to listen to the following video:

I found it thought-provoking. It reminded me of the fourth principle in my journey out of procrastination: find pleasure in the process rather than only the goal.

What Seth Godin says here is how beneficial the act of blogging is in itself, independantly of the impact of the published post on others. You know, the therapeutic effect of writing, and all that.

I think we’ve lost track of that with all the focus on the benefits of blogging as a finished product (the published post). The process of blogging is actually what is the most precious in this whole story.

Harry Joiner, who wrote the post where I found this video, says the following about his own blogging practice, which I think is worth quoting — also as food for thought:

My point is this: For a while last year, I began to think that — for me, anyway — blogging was simply a means to a marketing end.  It was about being #1 on Google for my primary keywords, and once that was accomplished — what was the point of blogging more?  After all, I had a company to run.

Turns out I was wrong. The primary benefit of blogging is to develop and maintain a teachable point of view on something of value.  It’s about learning to communicate more effectively.  And as Seth says in the video above, “to contribute something to the conversation.”

Happy blogging!

Blog, What Happened to You? [en]

When I’m asked what the difference between a blog and a website is, I usually make this drawing to explain it.

Difference between a blog and a non-blog website

It’s not perfect, but it helps. With a “traditional” topic-based website, you have a site structure which looks like a tree, with different pages on different topics. With a blog, you have a succession of posts organized chronologically (inverse chronologically, actually) on one page. Then each post has its page, and it’s archived forever in the back-office.

The two models tend to blend — more and more sites have characteristics of both.

There are two trends, however, which irritate the hell out of me. (If I know you and you’re doing this, please don’t take it personally — I don’t hate you for it. Really. But it annoys me.) They are:

  • the blogazine
  • systematic teasers or partial posts on the main blog page.

Prepare for the rant. I’m putting on my flame-proof underwear.

Blogazines

First of all, let me say that there is nothing wrong with making a magazine with a blog CMS. But Lord, why do blogs have to try to pretend they’re all magazines? It feels like bloggers are trying to make themselves look “high-profile”, because top “blogs” like TC, RWW, etc. are actually magazines. They might have started out as humble blogs, but they are not anymore.

“Media-blogs” are a special breed of blogs. Their content is there to generate revenue directly, through advertising and sponsorships. That has an impact on their content, and on the place they try to occupy, alongside old media. Why would everybody want to look like one? Dressing like a movie-star does not make you be one — and why would everybody want to be mistaken for one? If you’re a geek or a businessman or an entrepreneur, why don’t you just be that? There’s nothing wrong with being yourself and making you approachable.

There’s nothing wrong with having a blog that looks like a blog.

Coming to practicalities, there is a real concrete reason for me, as a user, to not like it when one of the blogs I read turns into a blogazine: very often, this transformation goes with the disappearance of the “main blog page”, the page which gave blogs the place they have in the publishing world of today, the unique stable page which you could go to at any time, confident that you would find the last 10 or so things the blogger you were reading had written.

The blogazine goes with excessive categorization and silofication of blog content. And I think that’s a real shame for most bloggers who take that route. Hey, even if all your last posts are on a big mixed-up main blog page, you can still point people to individual categories if you like. That’s what category pages are for, right?

Partial posts

People put forward all sorts of good reasons to display only partial posts on their main blog page (or archive pages) — roughly the following:

  • improved SEO
  • more page views
  • increased scannability

Until somebody shows me convincing data for either of these three claims, I am going to simply say “bullshit!” (and I’m remaining polite). I’m going to put the culprits on the stage one by one and tell you why I think my reaction is justified. I don’t have any research to back me up (am planning to do some though, so if you want to lend a hand, get in touch) but I do have some reasoning which I believe holds together.

Improved SEO

I have to admit I’m biased against SEO. For me, most SEO aside from “markup your stuff properly (be search-engine friendly) and have great content” is a pile of rubbish. I mean, there are some very obvious things one needs to do for SEO, but they are “common sense” more than “secret tricks”.

If a search engine is doing its job correctly, it will pull out the page that is most relevant for the human being who typed the keywords it based the search on. Make it good for humans, roughly, and it’ll be good for search engines.

When SEO gets in the way of the human experience, I have a big problem with it. And partial posts on the blog page does get in the way of a good reader experience. Why do I know that? Because of what I call the “closed door” phenomenon. A link to click, like a folder to open, is a closed door. You don’t know what’s behind it. You don’t know if it’s worth your while. Chances are you won’t click. Chances are you won’t read the rest of the post.

Even if you know the post is going to be worth it, to read the ten posts on the home page of such a blog, you’re going to have to click on each title (all ten of them), and open them in different tabs, or go back and forth, and maybe get lost in the process.

The original blog format puts all the articles neatly one beneath the other. You start reading at the top, scroll down as needed, and before you know it you’ve read the ten articles.

So, if it really does improve SEO to display only partial articles, I would say that the problem is with the way the search engines work. We should never be creating bad user experiences for the sake of SEO.

(I’m aware that what I claim about the “bad user experience” of partial articles on the main blog page needs to be demonstrated. Working on it. Get in touch if you want to help — or if you can save us the work by showing somebody has already done it.)

How exactly are the partial articles supposed to improve SEO? Well, as you can tell, I’m no expert, but based on what I’ve heard it has to do with duplicate content. Yeah, Google is supposed to penalize duplicate content. And of course, if you publish whole posts on your main blog page, and in your archives, then you’re duplicating the content from the post page — the one you want people to land on directly when they put the magic words into the search engine.

Only… I remember very clearly, in 2007, when Matt Cutts was asked about duplicate content on blogs. (And Matt, if I’m misremembering because it feeds my theory, please set me straight.) He didn’t seem to be saying that it was really a problem. And for what it’s worth, make a note that he’s providing complete posts on his main blog page — not excerpts.

The way I understand it, the duplicate content penalty is a weapon in the war against spammers and link-farms and splogs etc. Having 2-3 copies of the same post lying around do not make your blog sploggy.

Enough for the SEO.

More page views

What can I say about this? First, the reason people obsess about page views is because of advertising. If you’re rewarded for each ad impression, the more pages are viewed, the more money you get.

Sure.

But this begs the question: how much are you willing to sacrifice of the user experience (see above) for a few dollars? Most advertising revenue on blogs is miniscule.

People imagine that “more page views = more articles read”. Nope. I can read ten articles on your home page for only one page view if you publish whole articles. So of course, if you switch to excerpts only, you’ll see an increase in page views. But it doesn’t mean you’re being read more. Don’t be fooled. (This would need to be proved, of course — but the so-called proof that the excerpt method increases page views is worthless in my book, because it’s measuring something that isn’t really meaningful, unless your purpose in life is to sell ads on your blog rather than be read, which is your right, but in which case maybe I’m not going to be that interested in reading you anymore.)

I don’t care about my page views. I just want people to read my articles.

Increased scannability

This one is easy to deal with. Of course, it makes it easier to scan the articles on the first page, if it’s kept short by trimming the articles. Personally, I’m all for a display option that will allow you to see just a list of post names, or a list of post names plus excerpts. Feedly allows this kind of thing.

But do you want to be read, or scanned? Do you want people to read the first two paragraphs of your articles, or the whole articles? Do you prefer to have them scan more headlines, but click less to access the whole articles?

Again, the choice is a non-choice as far as I’m concerned.

The blog is not dead

For the last years, we’ve seen the “blog is dead” meme pop up regularly. I was recently interviewed on this topic by the Swiss National TV — just to show you it’s still around. Aside from the rise of Twitter and Facebook, the rise of the blogzine is often cited as proof of the death of blogs.

Bullshit. The bloggers are still there. We’re still there. We’re not going anywhere. (I need to write more about the so-called death of blogs.)

Now, please go and get rid of those partial articles on your blog pages.

Mots de passe: moins de naïveté! [fr]

[en] I write a weekly column for Les Quotidiennes, which I republish here on CTTS for safekeeping.

Chroniques du monde connecté: cet article a été initialement publié dans Les Quotidiennes (voir l’original).

Je suis régulièrement sidérée de la naïveté avec laquelle le grand public internautique traite ses mots de passe. Alors qu’on se pose des grandes questions sur la disparition de la vie privée puisqu’on est de plus en plus présents en ligne, on fait preuve d’une légèreté effrayante avec l’outil même qui permet de gérer la confidentialité de nos données.

Je vois deux raisons principales à cela:

  • une méconnaissance des risques
  • les instructions pour “faire bien” que nous donnes informaticiens et autres professionnels de la sécurité qui sont, disons-le franchement, quasi-impossibles à respecter tant elles sont exigeantes.

A proscrire:

  • utiliser le même mot de passe partout
  • donner son mot de passe à autrui
  • utiliser comme mot de passe le nom du chien, un mot du dictionnaire, son signe astrologique…
  • entrer son mot de passe ailleurs que sur le site pour lequel il a été prévu (par exemple, quand Facebook vous demande votre mot de passe Gmail… non, non!)

J’en vois déjà qui pâlissent. Ne vous inquiétez pas, j’ai l’habitude de voir pâlir ainsi mes clients.

Mais pourquoi diable faut-il faire si attention? Craquer un mot de passe qui est un mot du dictionnaire, ça prend très peu de temps. Un petit programme qui tourne, et hop, le tour est joué, on est dedans. Une fois que quelqu’un a accès à votre compte, il peut changer le mot de passe pour vous empêcher d’y accéder, et se faire passer pour vous. Imaginez! Quelqu’un d’autre aux commandes de votre e-mail, de votre compte Facebook, de votre Twitter, de votre blog, de votre compte PayPal… Ouille!

Allons droit au but, j’ai quelques conseils pour vous:

  • définissez trois (quatre, en fait) niveaux de sécurité pour vos divers comptes en ligne: finances (PayPal, Amazon, iTunes, banques), identité (blog, serveur, Twitter, Facebook), autres services — et dans un groupe à part, votre e-mail
  • blindez le mot de passe que vous utilisez pour votre e-mail: si quelqu’un rentre dans votre e-mail, il peut changer les mots de passe de tous les services que vous utilisez — le compte e-mail est donc le maillon faible
  • assurez-vous que vous avez des mots de passe solides pour le groupe “finances” et “identité” (au minimum un mot de passe distinct pour ces deux groupes, et différent de l’e-mail)
  • pour les “autres services”, bricolez-vous un algorithme avec un mot de passe de base que vous faites varier en fonction du nom du service (si l’un d’entre eux a des fuites, cela ne compromettra du coup pas tous les autres)
  • en plus des lettres, utilisez majuscules/minuscules, ponctuation, et chiffres dans vos mots de passe (autant que possible!)
  • une méthode pratique: prenez un long mot, et insérez au milieu de celui-ci des chiffres et signes de ponctuation (exemple — à ne pas utiliser! — biblio38!theque)
  • une autre méthode pratique: choisissez une phrase dont vous gardez la première lettre de chaque mot, ainsi que les signes de ponctuation (exemple à ne pas utiliser non plus: J’ai maintenant 3 chats et je vis en Suisse. => J’am3cejveS.)

Allez, au travail! Allez changer au moins les plus importants de vos mots de passe.

Content: Paid vs. Free [en]

[fr] Quelques réflexions sur le fait que produire du contenu n'est pas gratuit. En général, celui-ci est subventionné soit par des pubs, soit l'accès est payant, soit il fait office de "budget marketing", ou alors les canaux de distribution sont payants.

Zeldman just wrote that content wants to be paid for, sending us to read Erin Kissane’s Content is Expensive (followed by Paying for it, which examines the four ways in which content can generate revenue).

Although I’ve been writing online for free for over 10 years now, I agree with the premise that content — especially good content — is expensive to produce.

I have a few thoughts around that.

If I can do something, and people have a need for that particular skill (or what I produce), it does not mean that (a) they are ready to pay for it or (b) if they’re ready to pay for it, that they will be willing to pay enough for it to be worth my time/skill/effort/expertise.

For example, I can write blog posts. I’m not too bad at it (I’m not the best, but I’m better than most people). Some of my clients need content on their blogs. I can do it for them. BUT there is a problem: often, the money they are willing to invest for that content, and the value it has for them, sets the price way too low for it to be worth my while. If we actually do go through and reach an agreement, chances are that I’ll feel underpaid and they’ll feel they’re wasting money.

One of my blogging friends is currently in this situation with a client — and maybe in some cases (like ours) part of the problem is the client not realizing exactly how valuable this content can be to them. But the fact remains that it’s not because somebody is ready to hire you to do something that it is a viable commercial endeavour. Another example of this situation is home arts and crafts — Suw and I had a discussion about this a couple of years back on Fresh Lime Soda (remember the times?) for home-made lace she was making: people would simply not be willing to pay a high enough price for it to cover materials and work.

This is also true in the sense that if people want something for free and enjoy it, it doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to pay for it. In that respect, I think that people like Philippe Barraud and Thierry Crouzet aren’t being very realistic if they expect to make their blogs paid content in the future. The fact that people read their blogs (and enjoy them) for free is not an indication that they would be ready to pay for it. That would be misunderstanding the power of free.

Erin talks about the subscription model in her second post:

Subscriptions didn’t keep most print publications profitable even when print was doing well—classified and display ads did. Legal databases, academic databases, super-specialized content . . . that’s something a lot of people or institutions will pay for. News? Bloggy or magazine-style content? Not so much.

That’s the conventional wisdom, which seems to be validated by disasters like Newsday’s acquisition of 35 whole subscribers in its first three months of operating behind a paywall. Jack Shafer provides a nice summary of paid content woes in Slate:, listing the NYT’s TimesSelect, the LA Times’s CalendarLive, and Slate itself as publications that tried and failed to make subscriptions work.

[…]

So what’s the upshot? People will pay for content that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere, either because:

  1. the information itself is unique, as with Consumer Reports, Cooks Illustrated, and the Gaming Industry Weekly Report, or
  2. the information is surrounded by obviously and uniquely valuable analysis and context, as with the financial newspapers.

The first is an easy sell; the second is a bitch and a half.

If your content meets either of the above criteria, you’ll also be attractive to advertisers. Funny, that.

Philippe and Thierry are both “writing professionals” before being bloggers — in my opinion, paywalling content (just like slapping ads on pages) is pretty much an “old media” way of doing things.

Now, does it mean that I believe we writers should not be compensated for our work? Not more than my stand on filesharing means I believe that musicians and other artists should not be compensated for theirs. Let’s go back to Erin’s article Content is Expensive and look at the two remaining “monetization” solutions for content (aside from paywalling and advertising). This is where things become interesting:

  • Marketing. A lot of “free” content is subsidized by its function as a marketing tool for the content producers or the people who pay them. Many, many blogs work this way. A List Apart now runs small ads, but long before it did, it worked as a marketing channel, establishing the expertise and credibility of its publishers and writers. Most non-fiction books are also subsidized by their value as marketing tools: they don’t pay well enough to be worth the effort for royalties alone. Most commercial content strategy work deals with this kind of content.

“Marketing” or some kind of self-promotion is the obvious. For more years than I care to count now, I have been answering the tired “so, how do you make money with your blog?” question with “I don’t. I make money because of my blog.” The time I invest in writing on my blog is my marketing budget.

And that doesn’t mean there is no love, or passion, and that this writing is narrow-mindedly self-promotional. I was a blogger before I became a social media professional, and will most probably continue being a blogger if I change my line of work. I am a thinker, and a sharer, and by genuinely providing content because I love writing and I hope I can be useful to others, I happen to also be promoting my business (business which, incidentally, grew out of this blog — and not the contrary).

This is a tough message to pass on to a client: “The money you’re paying me to write is actually marketing money. The content I provide will add value to your website for years to come, and help build your reputation and credibility. How much is that worth?” It’s not just words on a screen, disposable stuffing like so much of what is unfortunately filling our newspapers today. Scanned today, gone tomorrow. Great writing, online, has no expiry date.

Back to Erin:

  • Paid Delivery Channels (The New Hotness). The paid iPhone app is a way of getting people to cough up money for content that they normally wouldn’t dream of paying for so they can receive it in a convenient way. Kinda like how we used to pay for newspaper delivery instead of going to the library to read the paper for free. (Spoiler: there is nothing new under the publishing sun.) We’re going to see a lot more of this in the nearish future as publishers realize that the race to free has resulted in a pileup of bleeding, sad people with no income.

This, honestly, is something I find exciting. As a customer, I will definitely pay for convenience. I may not be inclined for the right to own a file which happens to be a song or an ebook (the slippery terrain of IP — my jury is still out on that one, to be honest) but I will without hesitation buy a song on iTunes, because it’s easy to look up, easy to pay for, unexpensive enough, lands directly on my iPhone and computer, is guaranteed good technical quality, and it comes with cover art. I’ll pay for an iPhone app if it makes it easier for me to access content that is precious for me. I’ll pay for a concert if it allows me to watch a song performed live 🙂 (I’m not sure that’s still in the “delivery channels” department, though…)

Ah well, this was supposed to be a short blog post with just a few links. Now look at me. No wonder I get blogging-anxiety when I haven’t written in a while.

Journée Ada Lovelace: Suw Charman-Anderson [fr]

L’an dernier, mon héroïne scientifique pour Ada Lovelace Day était Marie Curie. Un nom que tout le monde connaît. Cette année, changement de registre. Je vous propose une femme moins connue mais bien vivante, et que j’ai l’honneur de compter parmi mes amies proches. (J’avoue que le choix a été dur: pas tellement “mais de qui vais-je bien pouvoir parler aujourd’hui?” mais plutôt “bon sang, laquelle vais-je choisir?!”)

Alors un peu logiquement (même tellement logiquement que beaucoup ne le feraient pas, et donc ça vaut doublement la peine de le faire) je vais vous dire quelques mots sur Suw Charman-Anderson — l’initiatrice de la Journée Ada Lovelace.

J’ai rencontré Suw en 2004, ou peut-être même fin 2003 (la date exacte importe peu) sur IRC. IRC, c’est un réseau de chat “pur texte”, très ancien, et qui plaît bien aux geeks et geekettes. On s’est rencontrées “en chair et en os” quelques mois plus tard, mi-2004, et on est tout naturellement devenues amies. Mais ce n’est pas pour vous parler d’amitié que j’écris ici.

A l’époque où je l’ai connue, Suw s’était lancée (tôt!) dans la création de sites web (HTML et compagnie), après des études en géologie. Elle avait appris le gallois (“geekette”, ce n’est pas juste pour la technologie pure et dure!) et s’était mise au Python pour pouvoir programmer son propre robot IRC. Elle a rapidement acquis une réputation internationale comme experte en médias sociaux (social software à l’époque), au point qu’elle a d’ailleurs dû à un moment donner mettre un moratoire sur ses engagements à l’étranger en tant qu’oratrice. Elle a également créé l’Open Rights Group, une ONG dédiée à la protection des droits numériques au Royaume-Uni (et ailleurs).

Dans ce monde des médias sociaux, mine de rien à majorité masculine, Suw est mon héroïne-soeur. Elle est une scientifique de base, ouverte sur le monde des humains, et qui navigue avec aisance dans le milieu des nouvelles technologies. Elle (et d’autres comme elle) me rappelle que je ne suis pas seule. Qu’au milieu de tous ces hommes qui occupent souvent le devant de la scène dans notre milieu professionnel, il y a d’autres femmes comme moi, qui n’ont rien à envier à qui que ce soit, que ce soit par leur parcours ou leur expertise.

Another Small Step With Google Buzz [en]

[fr] Maintenant que le soufflé est un peu retombé, et que le gros problème de confidentialité de Buzz n'est plus qu'un mauvais souvenir, je commence à y remettre un peu les pieds, surtout suite à un article que j'ai lu, où l'auteur se demande si Buzz n'est pas le chaînon manquant entre Twitter et le blog -- un peu dans le même espace que Tumblr et Posterous.

It’s been some time now, the horribly privacy flaw has been fixed, I’ve hidden the “Buzz” label in my e-mail, and more or less forgotten about it.

A few days ago, a title caught my eye: Google Buzz and hybrid blogging. There was also something about the “missing link” in the accompanying text.

I read the article, and it’s been gnawing at the back of my mind ever since. A Buzz notification or two popped up in my inbox recently (people replying to things in my Buzz stream, which contained at the time not much beyond my blog, photos, unused Google Reader, etc).

Between the article linked above and the fact that somebody had actually used Buzz to react to one of my blog posts, I went to have another look. Thanks to some in-buzz help, I connected Digital Crumble to Buzz, and decided to throw Twitter in to see what happened. I decided to follow a few more people.

Right now, I’m waiting to see what happens. I feel like I’m slowly thawing towards Buzz. Buzz reminds me of FriendFeed, but less horribly chatty, and nicer (I’m not sure why yet). I just wish that I had a way (as the “reader”) to simply hide all the Twitter updates from the people I follow. I get those through Twitter already.