Category: Tools

Non, ce n'est pas un podcast, ça [fr]

A l’occasion de mon workshop dans le cadre de Pollens Pédagogiques, j’ai réalisé qu’il n’était pas inutile de rappeler ce qu’est et n’est pas un podcast.

En effet, dans le “langage courant”, on entend beaucoup le mot “podcast” utilisé pour faire référence “du contenu audio ou vidéo qu’on peut télécharger”.

Un podcast, ce n’est pas ça. Ce n’est pas juste “une vidéo en ligne”.

Un podcast, c’est l’équivalent audio ou vidéo du blog. (Avec le programme blogueurs de Solar Impulse, en passant, j’ai aussi réalisé à quel point il n’est absolument pas clair pour la majorité du public ce qu’est… un blog.)

Alors un blog, c’est… une succession d’articles organisés anti-chronologiquement.

Un blog est généralement disponible en HTML (ce que vous lisez peut-être en ce moment) et en RSS, format de publication que vous ne remarquez pas sauf si vous utilisez un lecteur de news, et qui vous permet de vous abonner au blog.

Un podcast, à la base, c’est un fil (flux) RSS dont le contenu n’est pas du texte, mais de l’audio ou de la vidéo. C’est une évolution de ce qu’on appelait à l’époque “l’audioblogging”. Ce qu’ajoutait le podcast, c’était l’inclusion dans le fil RSS du contenu “riche” (audio/vidéo) et l’automatisation (initialement à l’aide de scripts, puis via iTunes) qui permettait aux épisodes du podcast de se retrouver directement sur l’iPod de l’auditeur (d’où le nom podcasting).

J’ai en passant suivi l’histoire de la naissance du podcasting d’assez près à l’époque: fin 2003, mon ami Kevin Marks étant justement la personne à avoir fait la démonstration d’un script qui copiait automatiquement le contenu audio lié à un fil RSS vers iTunes, et donc vers un iPod. (J’adore quand le web nous permet de revivre l’histoire en direct, pas vous? Voici un extrait vidéo de la démo de Kevin.)

Donc, un podcast, c’est un blog dont le contenu n’est pas des articles composés de texte et de photos, mais d’épisodes audio ou vidéo.

Je me demande, en écrivant ça, si l’abus de langage qui nomme une “vidéo sur internet” un podcast n’est pas simplement le même que celui (bien trop répandu) qui nomme malencontreusement “blog” une publication isolée sur un blog, au lieu de “article” ou “post” ou “billet”. Ça ne viendrait à l’esprit de personne d’appeler “magazine” un article de magazine (on réserve ce nom pour l’ensemble des articles) ou “livre” une page dans un livre, pourtant.

Donc:

  • un livre est composé de pages
  • un magazine est composé d’articles
  • un podcast est composé d’épisodes (de podcast)
  • un blog est composé de billets, d’articles (de blog), de posts

Happy blogging and podcasting!

La subtilité du placement du @reply dans Twitter [fr]

[en] Remember that when you start your tweet by somebody's Twitter name, those of your followers who do not follow that person will not see the tweet. In some cases, you might want to reshuffle your sentence to make sure the Twitter name is not at the beginning of the tweet.

Allez, un petit article techno-pinailleur comme on les aime.

En 2009, Twitter décide que vous n’avez pas à voir dans votre flux de tweets les messages publics adressés (via @reply) aux gens que vous ne suivez pas.

Traduction: si j’adresse un message comme celui ci-dessous à @andreborschberg, et que vous ne le suivez pas, vous ne verrez pas mon message dans votre flux de tweets.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/stephtara/status/75144715531595776″]

Cela signifie que vous ne voyez pas tous les tweets des gens que vous suivez. Ce n’est qu’en vous rendant sur leur page utilisateur (voici la mienne) que vous pourrez voir l’intégralité de leur activité sur Twitter.

Twitter défend enttre autres ce choix en prétendant que les gens ne désirent pas voir des “conversations partielles”. D’autres, comme moi, aimaient justement beaucoup ces conversations partielles. Mais bref, c’est comme ça, il faut le savoir.

Quelles sont les conséquences?

Si vous êtes en train de vous adresser à une personne, pas trop de souci. Mettez son nom d’utilisateur (“@” inclus) en tête de tweet, et vos followers mutuels le verront. Tant pis pour les autres, c’est ainsi que Twitter veut que soient les choses.

Attention, par contre, si vous n’êtes pas en train d’adresser le tweet à quelqu’un, mais simplement en train d’y mentionner son nom, comme sujet d’une phrase, par exemple.

Si je tweete “@andreborschberg vient d’envoyer son premier tweet” c’est un peu dommage — car je suis en train d’essayer d’annoncer la chose aux gens qui me suivent et qui ne suivent pas encore André. Twitter interprète mon message comme étant adressé à ce dernier.

Comment faire, donc? Je vois deux solutions:

  • peu élégante: mettre un point avant le @ (vous avez sûrement déjà vu ça), ce qui donne “.@andreborschberg vient d’envoyer son premier tweet”
  • élégante: tourner sa phrase autrement, par exemple “vous avez vu, @andreborschberg vient d’envoyer son premier tweet!”

Pensez-y la prochaine fois que vous commencez un tweet par “@…” — désirez-vous cacher ce tweet aux personnes qui ne suivent pas la personne au début de votre message, ou non?

A Few Tools I Like [en]

[fr] Petite collection d'applications et de services qui valent la peine d'être explorés et utilisés, selon moi.

Quickly, before collapsing in a little sleepy heap, some tools I want to write about here, but am not writing about because I want to do it properly and that takes time, and I never get around to doing it.

So, maybe I’ll talk about them more in detail later on (some of them I already have talked about), but just in case, here are tools or apps I like and would encourage you to look at these days:

That’s it chickens… I might add a few if I’ve forgotten, my bed is calling!

Real-Time is Burying History on the Web [en]

I am somebody who believes that history is an extraordinarily important asset in trying to understand our present. Unfortunately, when we are too focused on the future, and innovation, and moving ahead, it’s very easily to neglect history.

I’ve seen it as a characteristic of developing countries (sweeping generalization here, stop me if I’m wrong), with the thoughtless chopping down of centenarian trees and bulldozing of historical monuments in Bangalore. What’s important is where we’re going — we don’t really care about where we came from, and in some cases, would rather forget.

And we’re seeing it now in the hyper-technological cutting-edge world of the internet, where web history is being sacrificed on the altar of instant (do read Suw Charman‘s excellent post and then come back here).

A year and a bit ago, the theme of LeWeb’09 in Paris was “Real-Time Web”, and indeed, everybody was a-buzz with everything real-time. So much so that I had to give that year’s official bloggers a little wake-up call (I blogged it later) a day before the conference, because I was hearing increasingly worrisome comments (to my “official bloggers’ mom” ears) along the lines of “well, I actually don’t think I’ll blog much this year, I’ll mainly be tweeting”. I was interviewed about something along the lines of “curating the real-time stream” by my friend Cathy Brooks (there’s a priceless moment in that video, watch it), and overall, everything was about now, now, now, now now nownownownownownow.

I’m tired of real-time.

It feels to me as if we’re driving with our nose in the steering-wheel, never stopping long enough to look behind us and see what road we’re on and where it’s really heading. I’ve noted over the last year or so that a lot of our content is migrating into these real-time flowy presency streamy services, and that some of the precious tools we had to make sense of our online publications are all but dead, like Technorati.

But link rot aside, it’s all still there online. And that makes it all the more frustrating to know that we just don’t have a way of getting to it in a useful way, as Suw describes very well in her article. In response, Reg Chua points out that search is skewed towards speed and the present — a perfect corollary to our obsession with real-time and progress.

My tweets from day 1 (December 8, 2006 with a lot of enthusiasm) are still online somewhere. Here’s the oldest one I could lay my hands on (the podcast in question was Fresh Lime Soda), thanks to the wayback machine (if you go down that alley, note how we get a peek at what early tweeting was like in pre-hashtag times). It makes it all the more maddening that they are impossible to access if I don’t have a link to them. Twitter has them, they’re there, but they’re not organized in a way that makes them of any use.

Sidenote: this blog post is moving from “lack of access to general online history” to “lack of access to personal online history”, which is a subset of the problem.

Within that “personal online history” subset of the problem, let me state that I find it a disgrace that Twitter will not even let its users download a copy of their own data in the service, barring the last 3000 tweets.

I understand the need to restrict access to the huge number of tweets in the database for general use. I get that. But I don’t get why I should not be able to do a one-time download of what I put in the service.

I hate the expression data theft because when you take data, you always leave a copy somewhere (and theft removes the copy), but in this case, this is what it feels like. Twitter has my data and can do stuff with it, and I can’t. That just doesn’t feel right. (And don’t wave the “Twitter is free, don’t complain” argument in my face: just like Suw, I would be more than ready to pay for Twitter as a service, but they won’t let me.)

Away from Twitter and back to our obsession with real-time and what it is doing to our history: where are the online historians? who is going to build the tools we need to dig through the tremendous wealth of data online? the buzzword of 2011 seems to be “curator”: well, we don’t just need curators to avoid getting knocked over by the firehose of the real-time web — we also need curators (preferably machines) to help us organise and sort through our online history.

 

Catching up With Backtype [en]

[fr] BackType: pour voir les commentaires que je fais dans la blogosphère, l'impact "social" de mon blog, les derniers tweets qui le référencent, et un plugin WordPress (TweetCount) qui va remplacer TechMeme pour moi, simplement parce qu'il liste effectivement les tweets référençant l'article en question, ce que TechMeme ne fait pas.

Image representing BackType as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

A few weeks ago I read that BackType was going to discontinue the BackType Connect plugin that I had used some time back here on CTTS, which prompted me to (a bit hastily, I’ll admit) make a comment about how you’re really better off not relying on a third party for hosting your comments (which is not what BackType does, my bad).

The BackType Connect plugin took offsite reactions to your blog posts (tweets, for example) and published them as comments. I have to say I was never really really happy with the plugin: installing it made me realize that most mentions of my posts on Twitter were retweets (or spambots) and that I didn’t want to mix that kind of “reaction” with my comments. At one point the plugin really stopped working (or gave me some kind of grief) and I dropped it.

I actually liked BackType a lot when they started out, and I owe them big time for saving hundreds of my blog comments when I dropped my database early 2009. Even though I wasn’t using their plugin, I was unhappy about the announcement — and even more unhappy when I discovered that my user page had disappeared (yes, the one displaying all the comments I’d made on other blogs and this one, which replaced what I’d used coComment for).

BackType, however, did something I liked a lot, and wished TweetMeme had done: allow me to see all the latest tweets linking to Climb to the Stars. This prompted me to take a closer look at what BackType was actually still doing, and report my findings of interest back to you, dear readers.

  1. Good surprise: BackType actually does still allow me to track comments I make all over the blogosphere — but it uses my URL rather than my user account to identify me.
  2. Already mentioned: tweets linking to my blog. Including old ones.
  3. The social impact of any URL: tweets, comments and friendfeed mentions over time, complete with mugshots of “top influencers“.
  4. TweetCount plugin, which is probably going to replace the TweetMeme plugin I was using until now,  because BackType actually lists tweets linking back to a post (compare with the TweetMeme page for the same post). I’ve always found TweetMeme a bit too close to Digg and TechMeme (you know I’m no fan of the race for popularity or breaking news). TweetCount counts a few less tweets than TechMeme, and I suspect its results are cleaner.
  5. If you like displaying tweets mentioning your posts on your blog, you should also check out the BackTweets plugin.

Does BackType do anything else that seems precious to you?

Conversation fragmentation is still an issue in today’s blogosphere, but tools like BackType (and even the Facebook Like button!) are helping is stitch the different pieces together.

Facebook Page Like Buttons: Quick and Dirty [en]

[fr] Comment ajouter à votre sidebar WordPress un bouton "J'aime" simple pour vos pages Facebook.

Sorting out my mess of Facebook pages and groups (part 2 coming soon!), I’ve spent way too much time struggling with the Facebook Like Box creator and a couple of WordPress plugins (Facebook Social Plugins and Facebook Like Box Widget). I just didn’t manage to get what I want, which is a simple, minimal list of my Facebook pages and a Like button next to them.

Here’s what I wanted (it’s in the CTTS footer now, so you can also scroll down and see it live… and like my pages!)

Quick and Dirty Facebook Page Like Buttons

I didn’t want a Like Box full of stuff. Just the page name, avatar, and the like button.

Here’s how I finally did it (it’s dirty, but it works — just stick the code in a text widget if you have a WordPress blog):

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=7812744463" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:220px;height:60px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

Just replace the number after id= by your page’s ID (you can find it easily by going to your page, it’s the number following your page name in the URL.

If your page name is long, you might want to increase the height of your iframe to 80px or 100px (trial and error, you’ll find the right height).

There you go!

Oh, and I added like buttons to my posts, too, with the Facebook Like Button plugin. Dunno if it’s the best one out there or not, but it seems to work and I didn’t have to struggle too much setting it up.

Falling in Love With MailChimp [en]

A long time ago (at least it seems so) I got a newsletter from my friend Euan Semple. A couple of years back I had decided it was time for me to have my own newsletter (old skool can be good) but I have to say I’ve been less than regular at keeping my subscribers updated on whatever I was doing. Maybe partly because Google Groups is a pain in the neck, and also because I decided to make the newsletter bilingual-translated (a lot of work).

I still think newsletters are a good idea, when done well. When Euan sent me his, I asked him what he was using: MailChimp. I’ve been wanting to try it ever since and have recommended it to clients, but only yesterday did I decide to dive in and really get things going.

I love the UI and the tons of tutorials available. I managed to import my subscribers from my Google Group without too much trouble. One thing I like is that MailChimp allows you to make groups of subscribers inside a list: in my case, I made one for French and one for English. People can chose their preferred language (or even sign up for both). You can also add in custom fields, which I did to allow people to sign up for local (Suisse romande) news.

One thing I’m not quite happy with is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to batch-edit subscriber settings. For example, when I imported the list I set everybody to plain text e-mail, and now I want to switch them over to HTML. I’m also not sure to what extent people can edit their subscription settings once they’re subscribed, if at all.

MailChimp has all the tracking and segmenting features you can wish for. Under 500 subscribers and 3000 e-mails a month, it’s free.

It also has RSS to e-mail, which in my opinion is really precious. I’ve started to see how many people sign up to receive blog posts in their mailbox since WordPress.com implemented the feature. It would be a shame to miss out on that!

Now, the question that’s left for me is the following: do I create just one list, and let people choose options like “subscribe to blog”, “newsletter only”, “receive delicious links” — or do I create separate lists? I’m leaning towards just one.

Update 18.06.2010: Eeeps! I forgot to give you the link so you could sign up to my newsletter. Silly me!

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!

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.

Comment démarrer avec Twitter [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).

Twitter commence à faire partie du vocabulaire courant en Suisse Romande. Si tout le monde n’a pas un compte (de loin pas!), un nombre croissant de personnes savent ce qu’est Twitter, ou du moins en ont entendu parler, et désirent l’essayer.

Comme beaucoup d’outils composant l’internet d’aujourd’hui, Twitter est techniquement extrêmement simple à utiliser. La simplicité s’arrête là, malheureusement.

Tout comme savoir taper des mots dans un traitement de texte ne fait pas de vous un grand auteur, et aller à une soirée de réseautage ne signifie pas que vous allez en repartir le carnet d’adresses plein de contacts intéressants, réussir à composer des messages de 140 caractères dans le champ d’envoi de Twitter ne garantit pas que vous en tirerez quoi que ce soit.

Mais qu’est-ce qu’on peut donc attendre de Twitter? A quoi est-ce utile?

  • se construire un réseau de veille riche et réactif
  • créer de nouveaux contacts autour de centres d’intérêt communs
  • consolider et développer des contacts existants
  • avec le temps, et de la persévérance, s’entourer d’un réseau qui pourra devenir actif pour soi.

Tout ça ne se fait pas en une semaine, ni même en un mois. A part pour quelques chanceux, cela ne se fait pas tout seul et ça demande du travail. C’est la dure réalité! On a souvent des attentes complètement idéalisées de la rapidité et de l’efficacité des médias sociaux, vu qu’on est abreuvés par des histoires à succès impressionnantes, ces exceptions qui font de beaux titres dans les journaux. (“Marketing viral”, ça vous dit quelque chose?)

Bref, Twitter c’est un outil de création et de gestion de réseau extrêmement utile, et ça vaut la peine de s’accrocher un peu durant la période ingrate du début. Pour ceux qui se retrouvent un peu démunis une fois leur compte créé, voici quelques conseils de démarrage:

  • ne perdez jamais de vue que Twitter est un réseau social asymétrique: vous pouvez suivre qui vous voulez sans qu’ils doivent vous suivre en retour — de même, ne vous sentez pas obligé de suivre en retour tous ceux qui vous suivent
  • regardez parmi vos amis/connaissances et dans votre réseau existant qui a déjà un compte Twitter et suivez-les
  • la plupart des blogueurs sont sur Twitter — si vous appréciez un blog, suivez donc son auteur
  • utilisez le moteur de recherche de Twitter pour suivre des gens qui vous paraissent intéressants ou qui abordent des sujets qui vous interpellent
  • gardez un oeil sur les personnes qui se mettent à vous suivre (vous voudrez probablement en suivre certains en retour), mais ne tombez pas dans le panneau de ceux qui suivent un maximum de personnes juste pour gonfler leurs statistiques
  • de façon générale, suivez avec discernement mais généreusement: dans le doute, abonnez-vous à un compte qui paraît intéressant — quitte à vous désabonner après quelque temps si votre première impression ne se confirme pas
  • utilisez votre compte Twitter pour partager pensées intéressantes ou liens glânés ici ou là au fil des journées, et pas juste pour promouvoir vos activités ou poser des questions (tout est une question de dosage, et le dosage maximum pour le contenu “promotionnel” est vite atteint)
  • répondez aux gens que vous suivez lorsque c’est pertinent (ce dernier bout est capital: s’il n’y a pas de vraie valeur ajoutée, mieux vaut se taire).

Et finalement, le conseil le plus important que je puisse vous donner: intéressez-vous aux gens. C’est la meilleure recette de réseautage que je connaisse, en ligne ou hors ligne.

Tweetez bien!