Retour de vacances [fr]

[en] I've written a lot about my holidays in English. Time for my French readers to get a share!

Voilà, j’ai promis quelque chose en français, me voici donc. J’ai filé à la montagne pour une petite semaine au vert, sans internet, avec pas mal de marche et beaucoup de photos de fleurs.

J’ai un chalet (copropriété familiale, il appartenait à mes grands-parents, je me retrouve donc avec une tranche) à Gryon, tout près de la gare, et que je ne fréquente de loin pas assez.

Une de mes excuses c’est que c’est compliqué d’y monter, surtout maintenant que je n’ai plus de voiture, avec le chat, etc — mais expérience faite, ce n’est pas si terrible. Ça coûte une dizaine de francs aller simple. La même chose que pour aller à Genève.

Je mets le chat dans sa cage, et le charge sur les roulettes de mon caddie à commissions. Il y a un bac à litière et du sable déjà là-haut, et si je m’organise un peu, je monte des draps que j’y laisse, histoire de ne pas avoir besoin de descendre à chaque fois les draps communs pour les laver après utilisation. Un taxi direction la gare depuis chez moi, hop, 90 minutes de train, et j’y suis.

Gryon, c’est un coin superbe. Ça faisait une année que je n’y étais pas montée (et même quelques mois). Surtout, c’est un coin que je n’ai jamais vraiment fréquenté en été (du moins depuis mon enfance). Je garde des bons souvenirs de marche en montagne avec mes parents et des amis, quand j’étais enfant. Oui, c’était parfois pénible, marcher des heures et des heures, mais je crois que j’aimais assez ça — du moins retrospectivement.

Cinq jours sans accès internet, vous vous rendez compte? Ça faisait des années que je n’avais pas fait ça. J’avoue n’y avoir pas trop pensé, avant. J’ai toujours eu assez confiance qu’il me serait sans trop de difficulté possible de me passer de “connexion” durant un moment. En fait, je n’avais même pas tellement prévu si j’allais profiter ou non des possibilités offertes par mon téléphone mobile (e-mail, Twitter, chat/skype).

Après une première journée où j’ai manqué consulter mon e-mail durant les moments où j’étais seule, j’ai assez vite “déconnecté” sans souffrance. Oui, je me demandais parfois ce que j’avais dans mon inbox, tout comme je me reprenais parfois à penser au travail — mais simplement dans la mesure où quand on travaille non-stop et sous pas mal de stress durant des mois (voire des années), eh bien, il faut quelques jours pour décrocher complètement.

Marcher m’a fait le plus grand bien. Marcher, regarder les montagnes. Prendre des photos — un plaisir redécouvert, après quelques années ou la photo est devenue pour moi de plus en plus orientée “objectif-publication” (aux conférences surtout — prendre beaucoup de photos, les mettre en ligne à mesure, taguer, etc.)

J’ai envoyé quelques photos avec TwitPic, histoire de faire saliver un peu mes amis, mais pas de façon compulsive. Comme l’a bien dit Xavier, quelque chose qui me ressemble assez peu: pas de tags, pas de notes, juste une photo et un petit titre.

J’ai décidé que je voulais marcher plus, venir au chalet plus. Et j’ai bloqué des dates de retour à la montagne avant de redescendre en plaine. C’est beaucoup plus facile de bloquer des vacances quand on est reposé et en train justement d’en profier, que lorsque l’on est pris dans la spirale infernale du stress-travail.

Pour prendre de la distance, c’est important de se recentrer. Et me retrouver 5 jours à la montagne, avec une copine, à faire des activités tout sauf intellectuelles (marcher, dormir, manger, bûcheronner dans le jardin, papoter un peu et lire/écrire avant que le sommeille ne m’assome, avant 10h du soir), c’est ce qu’il me faut. Pas de soucis, pas de prises de tête, pas de possibilité de faire quoi que ce soit. Repos forcé de l’esprit. De temps en temps, rebooter la machine.

Etre au milieu des montagnes, en pleine nature, ça aide à prendre un peu de distance par rapport à ses soucis et à sa vie. Les montagnes sont là depuis de millénaires, immuables. Leur présence me donne le tournis. On voit sur elles la trace de leur naissance, les plis rocheux un jour liquide. Et puis dessus, quelques petits chalets. L’homme est un invité sur cette terre. A Lausanne, le lac me fait un peu le même effet. Mais en moins radical.

J’aime la montagne.

Une source importante de mon stress est ma tendance à aborder tout problème comme s’il s’agissait d’une question de vie ou de mort. Je prends les petites choses beaucoup trop à coeur, je m’y épuise.

Depuis mon retour, je m’exerce à “m’en foutre”. Pas dans le sens d’être indifférente, mais de me détacher un peu, de me laisser moins affecter. A ne pas prendre les choses tellement à coeur, justement.

J’ai ralenti, et je dédramatise. Le ralentissement est particulièrement perceptible. Je mets le temps qu’il faut pour faire les choses, plutôt qu’essayer de les faire aussi vite que possible, d’être la plus productive possible. Ça n’a rien à voir avec utiliser ou non une méthode telle que GTD, mais vraiment avec sur quel “canal” je branche mon cerveau.

Et là, je sens que c’est pour de vrai. Quand je me réveille, je ne me sens pas sous pression de démarrer au plus vite, d’abattre ceci ceci cela durant la journée, ce qui va habituellement de pair avec une furieuse envie de ne rien faire, de procrastiner, ou de replonger dans les bras de Morphée pour une heure ou deux.

Je me recentre sur moi. Je prends le temps de me lever. Se lever c’est pénible, j’ai souvent l’impression qu’il me faudrait plus de sommeil, mais en fait (et c’est mon couchsurfeur de l’autre soir qui m’a sorti ça, sans ce rendre compte que cette phrase me suivrait durant des jours), “après on se sent mieux”. Se lever c’est pas drôle, mais en fait, une fois qu’on a fini de se réveiller, on se sent mieux. J’expérimente ça très consciemment depuis deux jours, et c’est vrai. Plutôt de focaliser sur la pénibilité du réveil, je garde à l’esprit que c’est un passage difficile pour me sentir mieux plus tard.

Au chalet, j’ai découvert le plaisir de me “réveiller” dans le jardin. Non pas que je dormais dehors — je parle de la phase où on “émerge”, où l’on ne dort plus, mais où tout ne fonctionne pas encore. Chez moi, cette phase un peu vaseuse se faisait souvent en ligne. Il y a un moment j’ai découvert que passer ces 10-15 minutes sous la douche plutôt que dans son e-mail était nettement plus agréable. Mais ça n’est pas rentré assez profond pour que je change mes habitudes.

Là, au chalet, une fois réveillée, j’allais sur le balcon regarder les montagnes, puis je sortais avec le chat, qui, peu à l’aise dans ce territoire qui n’est pas le sien, rechignait à aller prendre l’air tout seul.

D’une certaine façon, je dirais que ces petites vacances à la montagne m’ont aidée à mieux me reconnecter à ma vie.

Voilà, chers lecteurs francophones. Vous voyez comme c’est. Je vous néglige pendant des semaines voire des mois, puis je vous assome d’une tartine qui n’en finit pas.

On va s’arrêter là. Mais n’oubliez pas de jeter un oeil aux photos des vacances!

A couple more days offline [en]

[fr] Encore quelques jours à la montagne, et une réflexion sur l'e-mail.

Oh well — the text I wrote this morning was wiped by a computer crash. Maybe I should use a text editor with autosave.

So, back at the chalet after another day walking. About 4 hours today. 5 yesterday. The day before: raking, sawing, chopping, cutting, carrying branches — in short, transforming the jungle around the chalet into something resembling a garden. So, I’m physically exhausted, but I feel great. My brain on drugs. It must be all those endorphins.

I want to come here more, go walking in the mountains more, spend more time out of the city. I almost found myself wondering what kind of seasonly job I could find here — but it was just idle wondering, I don’t really want to do that. What I have done, though, is opened up iCal and blocked 3-5 days here every month. I wanted to do it before I left, because when I’m here I always want to come back more, but as soon as I go back to “regular life” all the “important things” get in the way.

I’ve been so busy doing physical stuff that my brain has been on hold these last days, which is a really good thing. I’ve tired myself out (went to bed and actually turned the light off before 10pm last night — something I hadn’t done in ages).

My time, when I haven’t been walking or cutting down trees, has been eating, looking at the view, chatting (a little) with the friend who came up here with me, reading, writing (this) and… sorting photos.

I’ve been taking photographs again. I think that one of the reasons I almost completely stopped taking photographs these last six months is that it had started to feel like work. Completely goal-driven, get the photos online, publish fast, sort, title, tag, sets, collections… I’ve known for a long time that one of my problems in life is that I’m too goal-driven. I don’t put enough energy into enjoying the process. Singing and judo are two process-driven activities I enjoy. But maybe I need more. And maybe I need to move most of my activities towards “less goal, more process”. Hmmm, maybe painting.

Being without e-mail has turned out to be easy. I had not decided beforehand if I would use my phone to access e-mail, chat and tweet while I was up here. I told everybody I would be completely offline, but I knew I had the possibility to “break the fast” if I wanted to. I think the first step was the most difficult one: the first evening here, I was tempted to check my e-mail, and almost did, actually. I think what kept me from doing it was that I had company. I could feel that the short moments when I was alone, I would reach for my phone and think about having a peek at my e-mail. But I didn’t. And right now, there’s no point. I mean, there is a pile of it anyway, and I’ll have to sift through it anyway.

I’m quite happy with how things have gone. In final, I’ve succeeded in taking my mind almost completely off my professional and personal worries, and when I think of them right now, typing away on the balcony with the mountains in front if me, they seem much more bearable. I guess that’s what holidays are for.

On the topic of e-mail, I have a theory about why it’s the first step that costs, and once you’ve gone without e-mail for a day, it’s easier with each day that passes (well, more or less). One book that I’ve been reading during my idle moments up here is Fooled by Randomness. At one point, Taleb explains how checking stock prices many times a day exposes one to the many ups and downs of random fluctuations. Lots of ups and lots of downs.

He also notes the psychological impact: if one is happy when the stock price goes up, one is unhappy when it goes down — but more unhappy. This is something I read about in The Paradox of Choice: losing 20$ makes you more unhappy than winning 20$ makes you happy. What this means, in Taleb’s example of constant exposure to random fluctuations, is that if the stock price at the end of the day is roughly the same as at the beginning, one’s psychological state, however, will not. All those “downs” take their toll, and the whole experience ends up making one more depressed or anxious.

Now, back to e-mail. For me, clearly, there is a “reward” factor in checking e-mail. We’re all familiar (I hope) with the intermittent reward reinforcement phenomenon which plays a part in how we train ourselves to check our e-mail more and more often. Good news, exciting news, a message from a friend we haven’t heard of in some time, a prospective client… all those are “reward” e-mails, “ups”. And then the downs: problems or simply… no interesting news.

So, imagine you check your e-mail 50 times a day, but you get about 10 “exciting” e-mails. That’s 10 ups for 40 downs. Now, imagine you check your e-mail 5 times a day. Even if your exciting e-mails aren’t spread out evenly during the day, there is a chance you might only experience one “down” (no news) e-mail check.

Should this argument be used to support the “check your e-mail twice a day” technique? I have a problem with that. E-mail is a rather high priority communication channel. Less than the phone or IM, though. I tend to deal with most e-mail either immediately (if it doesn’t require much processing or action), or within a few days. So… I’m not sure.

I do, however, think that this explains why it’s not very difficult to go another day without checking e-mail: I know that the next time I check it, there will be exciting news in it. And I don’t have the pressure of hoping to compensate for a series of “downs” due to checking it every five minutes on my cellphone for the last hour (particularly on a Sunday).

I also know that since I turned off Google Notifier for my e-mail, and put Gmail in a separate OSX Space, I’ve been checking my e-mail way less often (when I think of it, rather than when it thinks of me) and I’m much happier like that. I guess that if people send me an e-mail they need me to look at now, they can send me a tweet or an IM to tell me. (Assuming they’re Twitter- and IM-enabled, of course. But then, the people who aren’t probably don’t expect me to respond to their e-mail within an hour.)

This entry was back-posted upon my return online.

5 Lessons in Promoting Events Using Social Media (Back to Basics) [en]

[fr] Leçons apprises lors de la promotion de Going Solo:

  • communiquer directement avec les gens (messagerie instantanée, conversation offline, téléphone) est le mode de communication le plus efficace
  • ne pas négliger l'e-mail, les dossiers de presse, le matériel imprimable: tout le monde ne lira pas le blog ou Twiter
  • rien ne devient automatiquement "viral" parce que c'est sur internet: aider les gens à vous aider à passer l'info, par exemple avec un e-mail "forwardable"
  • aller où sont les gens, les retrouver dans leur communauté (Facebook, MySpace, Rezonance, LinkedIn... partout)
  • ça prend du temps... beaucoup de temps

J'ai été surprise à quel point tout ceci a été difficile pour moi, alors qu'une partie de mon métier consiste à expliquer aux gens comment utiliser les nouveaux médias pour communiquer plus efficacement. Une leçon d'humilité, et aussi un retour à certaines choses basiques mais qui fonctionnent, comme l'e-mail ou le chat. En récompense, par contre, un événement qui a été un succès incontesté, et tout cela sans le soutien des médias traditionnels (pour cause de communiqué de presse un poil tardif) -- mis à part nouvo, qui a répercuté l'annonce, mais qui trouvait que c'était cher!

One of the big lessons I learnt while organising Going Solo is that promoting and communicating about an event through social media requires a huge amount of time and energy. In this post, I’d like to share a few of the very practical things I (re-)discovered.

Even though part of what I do for a living is explain social media and its uses in marketing to my clients, I found it quite a challenge when I actually had to jump in and do it. (Yes, I’m aware this may sound pretty lame. By concentrating on the big picture and the inspiring success stories, one tends to forget some very basic things. Sending managers back to the floor every now and then is a good thing.)

The main lesson I learnt is the following:

  • 1. The absolute best channel to promote anything is one-on-one personal conversation with somebody you already have some sort of relationship with.

Any other solution is a shortcut. And all shortcuts have prices.

This means I ended up spending a lot of time:

  • talking to people on IM, IRC, and offline at conferences
  • sending out personal messages on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Anytime you do something to spare you this time (like sending out a collective e-mail, writing a blog post, or even tweeting — situations where you’re not adressing one specific individual directly) you dilute what you’re communicating. You open the door to:

  • imperfect understanding of what you’re trying to say
  • people not feeling like it’s really addressed to them (lack of interest, or lack of awareness that their actions are important to you)
  • people simply not seeing it.

I have many examples of this. I created a page with material people could use to promote Going Solo, in particular, blog sidebar badges. But not many people put them up spontanously, even amongst my friends. But when I started pinging people on IM and asking them if they would please put up a badge to support my event, they did it. They just hadn’t got around to doing it, hadn’t realised that them doing it was important for me, or it had simply slipped their mind. It’s perfectly understandable: it’s “my” event, not theirs.

Another example is when I started sending out my “forwardable e-mails” (lesson #3 is about them), most people stopped at “well, I’m not a freelancer” or “I can’t come”. It took some explaining to make sure they understood that the main reason I was sending them the e-mail was that they might know somebody who would like to come to the event, or who could blog about it, or help with promoting it. If I spared myself the personal conversation and just sent the e-mail, people were much less likely to really understand what I expected from them, even through it was spelled out in the e-mail itself.

And that was a big secondary lesson I learnt while preparing Going Solo: it’s not because people don’t get back to you, or don’t act, that they aren’t interested or don’t want to. The burden is on you to make it as easy as possible for them to help you.

Let’s continue on to the next lessons.

  • 2. Blogs and Twitter are essential, but don’t neglect less sexy forms of communication: newsletter, press release, printable material.

The first thing I did for Going Solo was to create a blog and a Twitter account. Getting a blog and Twitter account off the ground isn’t easy, and it took quite a lot of one-on-one communication (see lesson #1) (and blogging here on CTTS) to get enough people to link to them so that they started taking off.

But the lesson here is that not everybody is on Twitter, and not everbody reads blogs. We highly-connected types tend to forget that. It didn’t take me that long to get the feeling that I had “exhausted” my immediate, social-media-enabled network — meaning that all the people who knew me directly had heard what I was talking about, linked to stuff if they were going to, or registered for the event if they were interested.

So, here are some less “social media cutting-edge” forms of communication I used, most of them very late in the process (earlier next time):

Some comments.

Our press release came out so late that we got no coverage at all from traditional media, bar one exception, which focused on how expensive the event was. This means Going Solo Lausanne is a great case study of successful event promotion entirely through social media.

When I created the newsletter, I spent a lot of time following lesson #1 and inviting people personally to sign up, through IM most of the time. I sent out invitations through the Google Groups interface, of course (to the extent that I got flagged as a potential spammer). But I also went through the process of inviting people directly through IM.

A word of warning about newsletters: don’t add people to your newsletter unless you’ve checked beforehand that they were OK with it, or if you have a very good reason to do so (they are the speakers/attendees for your event) — but even then, it can be risky. I was recently added to a bunch of mailing-lists without having asked for it, rather than invited, and I find it really annoying. It’s way more impolite to unsubscribe from a newsletter than refuse an invitation to subscribe, so adding people can put them in an embarrassing situation (be impolite vs. be annoyed at getting newsletters one doesn’t want).

  • 3. Don’t expect “viral” or “organic” spreading of your promotion to happen, but prepare the field so it can: the forwardable e-mail.

There is so much talk about the fact that social media allows things to spread all by themselves (and indeed, there is an important potential for that, and when it happens, it’s very powerful) — that we tend to expect it to happen and be disappointed when it doesn’t. And let’s face it, it’s not something that we can control (sorry for stating the obvious again, I’m doing that a lot in this post) and it takes quite a bit of skill to create the right conditions so that it may happen.

So, now that we’ve set our expectations, what can be done to help things spread? I mentioned having exhausted my immediate network higher up, so I needed to come up with a solution which would help me reach beyond it. How could I get my friends to mention Going Solo to their friends?

Of course, our use of social media in general allows that. Blogs, Facebook Groups and Events, sidebar badges… all this is material which can spread. But again — what about the people who aren’t bathing in social media from morning to evening?

Back to basics: e-mail. E-mail, be it under the shape of a newsletter, a discussion list, or simple personal messages, has a huge advantage over other forms of online communication: you’re sure people know how to use it. It’s the basic, level 0 tool that anybody online has and understands.

So, I started sending out e-mail. A little bit of push is good, right? I composed a rather neutral e-mail explaining what Going Solo was about, who it was for, giving links to more information, and a call to action or two. I then sent this impersonal text to various people I knew, with a personal introduction asking them to see if they knew anybody who could be interested in information about this event, and inviting them to forward the message to these people. Nothing extraordinary in that, right?

I of course applied lesson #1 (you’re starting to know that one, right?) and tried as much as possible to check on IM, beforehand, if it was OK for me to send the “forwardable e-mail” to each person. So, basically, no mass-mailing, but an e-mail written in such a way that it was “forwardable” in a “here’s what my friend Steph is doing, could interest you” way, which I passed along as a follow-up to a direct chat with each person.

In a more “social media” spirit, of course, make sure that any videos you put online can easily be shared and linked to, etc. etc — but that will be pretty natural for anybody who’s familiar with blogging and “being online”.

  • 4. Go where people are. Be everywhere.

Unless your event is already very well known, you need to go to people, and not just wait for them to come to you. If you’ve set up a blog, Twitter account, newsletter, then you have a place where people can come to you. But that’s not enough. You need to go where people are:

  • Facebook
  • Upcoming
  • LinkedIn
  • Xing
  • MySpace
  • Pownce
  • Seesmic
  • Existing communities big and small… (blogs, forums, chatrooms)

Again, this is a very basic principle. But it’s not because it’s basic that it’s invalidated by the magic world of social media. Where you can create an event, create an event (Upcoming, Facebook, Pownce, Rezonance — a local networking thingy); where you can create a group, create a group — I waited a lot before creating a Facebook group for Going Solo, because I had a fan page for it already, but as you can see the group worked much better.

  • 5. It’s a full-time job.

Honestly, I didn’t think I’d spend weeks doing nothing else but send e-mails, update Facebook pages, blog, send e-mails, talk to people, IM, tweet, e-mail again… to promote Going Solo. It’s a huge amount of work. It’s so much work that one could imagine having somebody full time just to do it. So when you’re (mainly) a one-person shop, it’s important to plan that a significant amount of your time might be spent on promotion. It’s easy to underestimate that (I did, and in a major way).

Working this way doesn’t scale. At some point, one-on-one communication takes up too much time and energy to compensate for the benefits it brings over more impersonal forms of communication. But that only happens once your event is popular enough. Before you’ve held your first event (which was the situation I was in with Going Solo Lausanne), you don’t have a community of advocates for your work, you don’t have fans (you might have personal fans, but not fans of your event) or passionate attendees ;-), you don’t have other people doing your work for you.

At the beginning, every person who hears about your event is the result of sweat and hard work. Hopefully, at some point it’ll take off and you’ll start seeing more and more people blogging about the event you’re organising — but even then, it might take a while before you can just sit back and watch things happen. But in case this moment comes earlier than planned, you’re all set: you have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook group and a newsletter. Until then, though, you’re going to be stuck on IM and sending out e-mails.

A few last words

I hope that by sharing these lessons with you, I’ll have contributed to making things a little easier for somebody else in the same situation I was. You’ll have understood that I haven’t tried to be exhaustive about how to use social media for promotion — indeed, I’ve skipped most of the “advanced” stuff that is more often spoken about.

But I think it’s easy to get so taken up with the “latest and greatest” tools out there that we forget some of the basic stuff. I, for one, was guilty of that initially.

Also, one thing I haven’t spoken about is how to talk to people. Of course, some of what you’re doing is going to be impersonal. Own up to it, if you’re mass e-mailing. Don’t pretend to be personal when you aren’t — it’s hypocritical, doesn’t come across well, and can be smelled a mile away.

I haven’t quite finished reconciling my practical experience with how I believe things “should” work. I’ve learnt a lot, but I certainly haven’t figured everything out yet. I would have wanted to do a lot more, but time simply wasn’t available, so I tried to prioritize. I made choices, and some of them were maybe mistakes. But overall, I’m happy with how things went and what I learnt.

If you have had similar experiences, I’d be really happy to hear from you. Likewise, if you disagree with some of the things I’ve written, or think I’m wrong on certain counts, do use the comments. I’m open to debate, even though I’m a bit hard-headed ;-).

Inbox to Zero in no Time [en]

[fr] Un moyen radical (et quasi instantané) pour atteindre le fameux et très convoité inbox zero.

So, having trouble keeping your inbox count down? Piling up in the hundreds, the thousands, even? I have a totally foolproof method to bring your inbox count down to the coveted zero. It’s been tested in GMail, but I’m sure it works in other e-mail clients too.

The best part of it is how fast it works. The result is guaranteed.

Are you ready for it? Just follow these two simple steps:

  • click on “Select All”
  • press the “Archive” button

There! You’re done! Inbox to zero in now time at all. It works — or you can have your money back.

Now, for the slightly more serious part.

I really did this, this summer if I remember correctly, during a conference. I mean, I wasn’t going to go through all that piled up e-mail anyway. Most of the e-mails were obsolete — when stuff is really important, people e-mail again, and again, or call you, or tweet you, or catch you on IRC or at an event.

Once your inbox actually is at zero, it’s much easier to keep it to zero. Archive without mercy. Answer easy stuff as soon as you see it (I do that to the point some people have told me my e-mails have become a bit curt, so I’m trying to add a bit of cream in again — but the basic principle remains: do it now). My inbox sometimes goes up to 40 or 50 if I stay away from the computer, but then I bring it back down again, over a few days. If I haven’t seen zero in some time, it’s time to deal with those two things lying at the bottom of my inbox for the last 10 days — or decide that I won’t, and archive them.

Sometimes, I feel I can’t keep up anymore, or don’t want to “deal”, so I archive.

Does that sound like I’m mistreating my e-mail? Sure. But so is letting it pile up in your inbox for weeks, months, and years.

Quechup = spammeurs [fr]

[en] If you get invitations to join Quechup, don't. They will spam your whole address book without asking you for permission.

Si, comme moi, vous recevez dans votre boîte trois ou quatre invitations provenant de personnes que vous connaissez (bien ou moins bien) à rejoindre le réseau social Quechup, n’y touchez pas! ils spammeront tous les contacts de votre carnet d’adresse sans vous demander votre avis!

Voici ce qui se passe: vous vous inscrivez, imaginant qu’un de vos amis vous recommande le service. Ensuite, comme vous commencez à en avoir l’habitude, Quechup vous propose de regarder dans votre carnet d’adresses pour voir si des contacts à vous sont déjà inscrits au réseau.

Vous donnez donc votre adresse et votre mot de passe pour que Quechup aille regarder, confiant que le service, comme d’autres que vous connaissez, vous proposera une liste de noms déjà inscrits que vous pourrez ajouter à vos contacts, et vous permettra aussi si vous le désirez d’inviter par e-mail certaines de vos connaissances.

Erreur! sitôt en possession de votre carnet d’adresses, Quechup envoie aussi sec une invitation à toutes les personnes qui s’y trouvent, sans que vous puissiez l’en empêcher.

Donc: Quechup => poubelle.

Si vous vous êtes fait prendre, premièrement ne vous donnez pas trop de coups de pied, d’autres s’y sont fait prendre (et pas des moindres, parfois, comme Hugh McLeod). Et deuxièmement, avertissez vos contacts (via mail ou blog) de ne pas donner suite à la jolie invitations personnalisée qu’ils viennent de recevoir de votre part… avant qu’il ne soit trop tard!

Empêchez le fléau Quechup de se répandre!

Faites des liens, ne demandez pas! [fr]

[en] Please don't send e-mails asking if you can link to my site. Yes, you can. You can link to any site you want. The whole web is built upon the premise that anybody can create a link to any web page. It's what make the web the web.

Le web (“internet” pour certains”) est une collection de pages en HTML liées entre elles. Ce sont les liens qui tiennent ensemble le web. Et ce sont aussi les liens qui en font un réseau, un endroit riche, un lieu de conversations et de partage.

Alors de grâce — ne me demandez pas si vous pouvez faire un lien vers mon site. Ne demandez à personne si vous pouvez faire un lien vers leur site. Faites simplement un lien. Pas besoin d’autorisation pour ça.

Vous imaginez, si chaque fois que je faisais un lien, je devais demander au propriétaire du site en question son autorisation? Et vous imaginez, pour les éditeurs de sites populaires comme Boing Boing, le temps qu’ils passeraient noyés dans des e-mails à répondre à des demandes d’autorisation de liens? Ce serait invivable. Tellement invivable que ça ne fonctionnerait pas. On ne ferait plus de liens, on n’écrirait plus, le web mourrait à petit feu.

Quand faut-il demander? Demandez, clairement, si vous allez rendre publics des faits concernant une autre personne qui ne sont pas déjà publics, et si vous avez un doute quant à sa réaction. Alors oui, parfois, ça peut prendre la forme d’un lien. Mais le lien est ici secondaire — c’est le texte qui peut poser problème. Dire “tel et tel est mon client”, si le client en question n’est pas d’accord que la collaboration soit rendue publique, ce n’est pas forcément une bonne idée — avec ou sans lien.

Puisque j’y suis, une exhortation: ne faites pas de vos pages, sites, blogs, articles ou billets des culs-de-sac du web. Vous faites référence à une information que vous avez trouvée ailleurs sur le web? Faites un lien. Vous parlez de quelqu’un? Faites un lien vers son blog ou son site. Donnez à vos lecteurs l’occasion d’accéder aux mêmes informations que vous, de voir sur quoi vous vous êtes basés pour écrire votre texte.

Mais de grâce, n’envoyez plus d’e-mails qui commencent avec “Bonjour, j’aimerais faire un lien vers votre site…” — c’est inutile et c’est un gaspillage du temps de votre destinataire.

A l’attention de ceux ou celles qui m’ont envoyé des e-mails du genre: soyez rassurés, je ne vous en veux point. Je sais que votre demande part d’une bonne intention — celle de respecter l’autre et de faire les choses dans les formes. J’espère que vous êtes maintenant rassurés qu’il est tout à fait accepté de faire tous les liens que l’on désire sans demander à qui que ce soit leur autorisation. Faites des liens! faites des liens!

Lijit Feedback [en]

[fr] Un peu de feedback sur Lijit, un moteur de recherche sympa qui s'organise autour du contenu en ligne d'une personne et de son réseau.

I lost the first version of this post in a Firefox crash while I was writing my post on structured portable social networks (that’s what I get for doing too much at the same time). With a bit of luck it will be better 😉

So, as promised, here’s my feedback to Barney about Lijit. First, for those of you new to Lijit, Stowe Boyd blogged about Lijit about a week ago, which is how I discovered it. (Yes, go sign up now, but come back here to read the rest of the post when you’re done. Thanks!)

Signing up must have gone reasonably smoothly, because I don’t have any screenshots of it — which is a good start. (When I bump into any interface problem or bugginess nowadays, I quickly grab a screenshot with Skitch and upload it to Flickr with a few notes. Photographs of my online life, if you like.)

I was disappointed that I could only add my del.icio.us and MyBlogLog networks. The latter is a good addition, but how about my Twitter network? Or a blogroll on my secondary blog? CTTS doesn’t have a blogroll (pure laziness). I tried importing my network from Facebook, but it was way too creepy, I disabled it as fast as I could. I got the feeling it was going to allow people to search through my friends’ notes and stuff — as well as mine. I do take advantage of the “walled garden” side of Facebook to publish slightly more personal stuff there than “outside”, and I know I’m not alone here.

What would be really neat would be if I were able to export just the connections I have to other people from Facebook, and if they are Lijit users, import their blogs and content into my network. Think portable social networks.

Being able to import the blogs I read (they’re my “network”, aren’t they?) directly from Google Reader (filter with a tag though, so I can keep all those naughty sex blogs I’m keeping track of out of the public eye).

I used Lijit twice to find the old posts I linked back to in the post above. First, on the Lijit website itself:

Holes in my Buckets (Lijit)

Then, using the wijit I installed on my blog:

Lijit Search On Blog

That’s pretty neat. Lijit opens a “fake window” over the current page with the search results, and when I click on a link in the results, it loads in the initial browser window. Sounds obvious, but I like that it works — many ways it could have gone wrong.

I’m moderately happy about the space the wijit takes up on my blog:

Lijit Wijit on CTTS

I know companies are hungry for screen real estate (“make that logo visible!”) — but be less obtrusive and I’ll love you more! Notice that I now have Lijit search, normal Google search, and WordPress search. Way too many search boxes, but for the moment there isn’t one that seems to do the job well enough to be the only one. (Maybe Lijit, but I haven’t had it long enough…)

Stats page is neat, though I’m still totally unable to tell you what the two pie charts on the right do:

Lijit | My Stats

What on earth is Ma.gnolia doing in there?

There, that’s what’s on my mind concerning Lijit for the moment. Watch out for the screenshots if I bump into anything else!

Rédaction d'infos pour ciao.ch [en]

Mon travail de rédaction pour le thème internet de ciao.ch, un site d’information et de prévention destiné aux adolescents, avance plutôt bien.

L’association CIAO m’avait contactée il y a déjà bien longtemps, mais entre un job d’enseignante à quasi-plein temps à l’époque, des rechutes de TMS, et les débuts un peu sur les chapeaux de roue de ma vie de consultante indépendante, le rédaction a vraiment commencé au compte-gouttes. Mais là, depuis quelque temps, on a trouvé un rythme de croisière à coups d’après-midis dans leurs bureaux et de nombreux litres de thé de menthe assaisonnés de quelques gâteaux et chocolats.

Si vous avez un moment — et surtout si vous connaissez les adolescents de près ou de loin — votre avis sur ce qui est déjà en ligne m’intéresse grandement. Est-ce que ça vous paraît adapté, pertinent, adéquat?

Le thème est loin d’être complet. Seront mis en ligne prochainement des chapitres tournant plus autour de la “sécurité informatique”: virus, phishing, spam. Le reste attend d’être rédigé…

Flying Home Tomorrow With Easyjet. Or Not? [en]

[fr] Vu la situation (brouillard) à Londres et l'impact que ça a sur les vols, je crains un peu de me retrouver coincée à Londres demain soir. Surtout qu'Easyjet est injoignable par téléphone entre 20h et 8h et que leur site web refuse de reconnaître l'adresse e-mail que j'ai utilisée pour réserver mon vol.

I’m supposed to fly home tomorrow from Gatwick. If you’ve been anywhere else than under a rock these last days, you’ll know that flights out of London have been severely disrupted.

This morning, I called Easyjet to see if there was any chance my flight would be delayed or cancelled. Their website didn’t yield much information besides the standard arrivals page, which told me that one flight to Geneva yesterday afternoon had been cancelled.

Anyway, the lady was very reassuring. She took my flight number, and told me that the flight yesterday had arrived on time, and that I should be fine.

Tonight, I checked the arrivals page again, and saw that both flights to Geneva this evening had been cancelled. Ouch!

This is where it gets bad. I tried to call Easyjet again, but all their lines are closed after 8pm. Great! Even the one you reach after spending 10 minutes in the menus, where you choose “if your flight has been cancelled, please press 2”. They just tell you to use the website if you want to cancel or change a flight. Well, that’s fine with me, except… For some reason, Easyjet doesn’t recognize the e-mail address I used to book the flight. They’ll send me a newsletter to the address, sure, but will say they’ve never heard of it when I try to use it to log into the website.

And the technical support line is £1/minute.

If I know there is a good chance of my flight being cancelled, I’d like to know about it so that I can make other plans. Change my flight, go back to Leeds, take the Ferry, whatever. What I’m worried about is that my flight is after 8pm. What if it’s cancelled, and I’m supposed to “contact my airline”?

All this is making me somewhat grumbly. I’d really like to get back home for Christmas.

Update: I sent an e-mail to Easyjet about the e-mail address issue. I’ll receive a response from them withing 20 working days. How’s that for an SLA on e-mail responses?