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Going to London tomorrow. I was curious to see the flashmobs activity there, check the link. For the ones interested in Paris Flash Mobs, http://parismobs.free.fr
I love flashmobs. The only thing I do not like: it is useless. Should not we organize a flashmob that could help a humanitarian cause, homeless, etc ?
Preparing a new weblog startup, I keep telling everybody about why it is great to have and create a weblog. So I thought that I could write here my song and dance
Well more than two years ago I had an article somewhere on me and an early blogger sent me an email asking me why I did not have a weblog and to be honest, I did not really get it. I thought like many tell me now, "it is just another personal home page, why would I need one ?". Recently, at the WEF GLT conference, I spend a lot of time with Joi Ito who transmitted to me his passion about weblogs, his weblog is clearly incredible and I read it very often. I discovered the great way it is to exchange views and keep in touch with real and virtual friends. After these passionated discussions, I have started spending all my time getting it and preparing a new company.
Well basically a personal home page is useless, rarely refreshed. The new thing about blogs is that they LIVE if the author publishes on them. It is very easy to publish without any knowledge with tools such as u-blog.
The RSS content readers are a great way of browsing news without having to go in the browser, I use Net News Wire, it is so easy, you just subscribe to somebody whose content you like and you get the news, even off-line in a train, like if you subscribed to a newspaper.
Others know you have published something either by subscribing to your blog, by searching on search engines as your blog gets referenced, by just going to your blog of course or by reading the latests posts published by blog editing softwares like u-blog's home page, or blogger.com and so on.
This way you get your friends easily read your notes and COMMENT on them. The notes which get some interest get comments, and the more popular a blog is, the more comments it gets (have a look at how many comments Joi Ito gets on most of his posts.
It may look to many like "why the hell would I talk about myself" and why is there any interest to anybody ? Just do not talk about yourself, talk about your interests, or talk about what you live:
Well, have a look at The Baghdad Blogger, a book that is going to be released based on the blog of a young Iraqi calling himself 'Salam Pax' who began posting accounts of everyday life in Baghdad on to the internet. This shows one aspect of the power of blogs. It is so easy to publish that anybody can comment the news, and make the news. Dear Raed, the weblog
Starting to get into it with The Baghdad Blogger ? One of the really new thing is that the content is not specifically stored in one internet site, it is decentralized. You do not have to go to a specific forum to talk about Irak, just search the web and start commenting on the blogs themselves. Of course, the bloggers need to tell they are here. They do it through new kinds of search engines.
Have a look at Technorati. You will find here like in other new types of search engines the news the most talked about in the blogosphere, the people most linked to, the most popular websites by number of links pointing to them. This is the usual measure of popularity: if you have people linking into you, then it must be interesting.
Google acquired Blogger for many reasons but the idea to integrate targetted advertising into the blogger.com blogs specific content, and with the ads adapted to the content of these specific blogs is great. Let's say you are talking in your blog about kite surfing, one of my passions, you are likely to attract readers who like that too. How about a contextual ad for a kite surf manufacturer ?
This is not new for geeks, who would be laughing at this article if they happened to read it (blogs are three years old already), but my personal belief is that nothing is really big if it is not adopted by most people. So this is new.
New search engines, new way to read the news, new decentralized content. Take the books reviews. If you go to Amazon, of course you go and see who has read the book you have heard about, read those comments before you buy it. These comments are centralized on Amazon.com and on many other bookstore sites. When the blogs are more popular, people are more likely to post comments about a book (like with Typepad book comment feature) on his blog. Amazon and the others will just use that content rather than letting people publish on their site, as it will be much richer.
My guess is that it will be the same with posting an ad to sell a car, making a comment or looking for comments before buying a new phone, and so on.
A new blogosystem, with new players, new companies.
Let's start my own blog. My apologies to the French-speaking bloggers to whom I belong, I have chosen to write mostly in English so that I can exchange my views with most people. I will also blog in French from time to time, a new functionality to create in u-blog: multilingual blogs ?
