Giving back...or paying it forward...online

Since the beginning, the web has been a great place to discover new things, share and learn.  Suddenly, everybody could connect to everybody.  You could read the blog of another little human living on the other side of the planet.  With the emergence of web 2.0 technologies, one to one and many to many communication has evolved towards collaboration possibilities.  You can now work with people all the world to achieve projects, to help, to get involved.

Here a few starters to help you get involved.

1-  Use the web to find real life vounteering opportunities: volunteermatch

Bringing people together : VolunteerMatch strengthens communities by making it easier for good people and good causes to connect. The organization offers a variety of online services to support a community of nonprofit, volunteer and business leaders committed to civic engagement. Our popular service welcomes millions of visitors a year and has become the preferred internet recruiting tool for more than 75,000 nonprofit organizations.

2- Make micro-loans to help entrepreneurs accross the globe:  kiva

Loans that change life.  Kiva's mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.  Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.

Kiva was born of the following beliefs:

• People are by nature generous, and will help others if given the opportunity to do so in a transparent, accountable way.


• The poor are highly motivated and can be very successful when given an opportunity.


• By connecting people we can create relationships beyond financial transactions, and build a global community expressing support and encouragement of one another.

Kiva promotes:

• Dignity: Kiva encourages partnership relationships as opposed to benefactor relationships. Partnership relationships are characterized by mutual dignity and respect.


• Accountability: Loans encourage more accountability than donations where repayment is not expected.


• Transparency: The Kiva website is an open platform where communication can flow freely around the world.

As of November 2009, Kiva has facilitated over $100 million in loans.

3- Micro volunteering via your iPhone: Give Work

Have a minute? Samasource and Crowdflower present Give Work, their new iPhone application. Give Work lets you support refugees in Dadaab, Kenya—the world’s largest refugee site—in minutes by completing short, on-screen tasks. The refugees are training to complete these same tasks and, by volunteering to tag a video or trace a road, you will generate money to support their training as well as valuable data to help focus future training programs.

Crowdflower, a Bay Area company that provides efficient crowdsourcing for short, simple tasks, is providing the jobs. As soon as a refugee reaches 75% accuracy, he or she will move from the training to the work.As soon as a refugee reaches 75% accuracy, he or she will move from the training to the work.

4- Green activisme via crowdsourcing, help monitor watersheds: Creek Watch

A new iPhone app can turn would-be environmentalists and folks concerned about water quality into helpful data gatherers.  Most people living in cities in the U.S. don’t think much about the streams they drive over or pass by. With a new iPhone app, IBM hopes to change that and improve water quality and information about water supplies. The newly launched free app on Apple’s iTunes store enables people with iPhones to become citizen reporters–or citizen environmentalists (more details on Forbes blog).

These are just a few examples.  Let us know of other web based volunteering opportunities you support.

Who dominates the social web ? Hint : Chicks Rule !

Here is a great infographic by David McCandless at www.informationisbeautiful.net.  Like every good data visualization diagram, it doesn't neeed any explanation.  Raw numbers wouldn't talk to us, but what your eyes see immediatly make sense to your brain.

Robinhooding Subway, or how to make those doing well do good

The 100 Brands Project from Robin of Shoreditch on Vimeo.

Despite the recession, the global economy is a massive force of commerce, shuffling billions of dollars around its ecosystem of goods and services. By comparison, the nonprofit sector — and humanitarian aid in particular — is microscopic. So what if could take a fraction of that fat commmercial mega-budget and allocate it to underfunded good causes? That’s what Robin of Shoreditch, a group of anonymous creative outlaws, is doing with The 100 Brands Project — an effort to take from the rich and give to the poor, or in this case, to the people of Haiti.

It’s a simple, brilliant idea — the team, composed of various ad industry creatives, do what they do best: They offer each company on BrandZ’s 100 brands index a creative idea that could help their business and, in return, they ask for 1/10000000 — that’s one ten-millionth — of the value of that brand as a fee, 100% of which goes to relief efforts in Haiti.

Why go anonymous?

"The truth is we’d rather keep our identities secret so not to compromise our ‘normal life’ jobs at various advertising and marketing agencies. We’re creating ideas for the top 100 brands and some of these bring us into conflict with the brands we work on day-in, day-out through our jobs.” ~ “Little John”

None of the 12 companies approached so far have actually paid up, but we think this is a brilliantly innovative take on “corporate social responsibility” and any brand that embraces its incredible potential — to do good but also, perhaps cynically, to generate some solid buzz — would be deserving of an epic hat tip.

You can follow the project’s progress on the team’s blog and keep an eye on Vimeo channel for fresh videos every Monday.

Source: Maria Popova at brainpickings.org

USA in the Top 4 countries requesting the most data and content removal from Google and YouTube

This is the first time that Google publishes the number, per country, of government requests for data or content removal directed to Google and YouTube.
As stated in the results, the numbers maybe skewed as one request may concern dozens of urls, but the results are still interesting and slightly puzzling.

If it is no surprise that China bears a question mark, the names of the Top 4 countries who have requested way more data or content removal than the rest of the pack is less anticipated:

1- Brazil (291)
2- Germany (188)
3- India (142)
4- United States (123)

At the bottom of the list, one can find France, along with Sweden, Norway or the Netherlands with less than 10 requests. Accounting for the population size difference, the US government sends Google over 4 times more requests than France does.

An inquiring mind can't help wondering what this means in regard to the USA vs. France (and the rest of the world) approach to internet content and things like freedom of speech, laissez-faire etc. Or alternatively, it could show how much high level raw data, without context or details, can be misleading.

Ndlr: Hadopi is still so wrong for so many reasons.


Source: Government requests directed to Google and YouTube

Facebook’s Alternative Internet Vision And Its Search Implications

Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand.com attended the F8 Facebook developer event yesterday and reports interesting details on Facebook's vision of a social internet:

The vision articulated by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Bret Taylor, formerly of Google and Friend Feed (acquired by Facebook), is of a more social internet, where relationships between people and things replace links between pages. The vision represents a shift from a Google-centric internet comprised of billions of unrelated documents and sites to a Facebook centric one where social relationships and affiliations are the connective tissue in a vast network. [...]

There are three social plugins: Like, Activity and Recommendations plug ins. The most important of these is the Like button. This was widely anticipated.

Publishers and developers can add a Like button to any page on any site. Adding that button effectively turns it into a Facebook fan page.

Here’s the official description: ” [The] Like button offers users a lightweight and consistent way to share the things and topics that interest them.” For example Yelp, one of the launch partners, is adding a Like button to every local business profile page.

By clicking “Like” (and being logged into Facebook) you transmit that you like a business, in this case, back to your profile and feed. But you might equally Like a band (on Pandora) or Like a news story (on CNN) or a movie (on IMDB). Those Likes become part of your identity and in turn part of the data available to other publishers and sites in the “Open Graph” that Facebook envisions.



In the future all that public identity information, including Likes, will become available to Bing and maybe Google. Likes will also be enshrined in a specific area on your Facebook profile.

You must still authorize the sharing of your digital identity and public information with publishers. I asked Facebook about the following scenario: A user on Yelp “Likes” a sushi restaurant; can Urbanspoon later access my Yelp Likes (e.g., that sushi restaurant) to personalize Urbanspoon? The answer is yes.

In the Open Graph Urbanspoon can get access to my Likes on Yelp and any other site on which I’ve clicked the Like button. But Urbanspoon still needs my permission and authorization to access that data. This wasn’t entirely clear from the presentations or press conference. I had to talk to multiple people to gain clarity on the permissions and privacy issues.

The other social plug-ins, Activity feed and Recommendations feed, help make third party publisher sites more “social” in a couple of different ways, by showing me what my friends like or are doing on those sites. Again, all the sharing of information needs to be authorized by the user. It’s not entirely clear that Facebook users understand all the privacy settings on the site. And it’s far from clear that they’ll understand the implications of the new expanded sharing announced today. Facebook in my mind has the burden of explaining it to them.

For their part I think Facebook executives believe they have built in sufficient controls and privacy safeguards. I think they also perhaps incorrectly believe that ordinary Facebook users understand all the privacy controls.

The two other announcements, the Open Graph Protocol and Graph API, are strictly for developers/publishers. These tools make it easier for them to implement a Facebook log-in and integrate social features into their sites (the term “Facebook Connect” is going away but the functionality will remain). Facebook said that more than 75 partners were participating already and Mark Zuckerberg predicted that there would be “One billion Like buttons on web within 24 hours after launch.”

There was also brief discussion of a social toolbar that could sit at the bottom of any website and offer a range of social functionality to users. Facebook had been expected to announce a location API or geotagging. That announcement didn’t come but it is likely coming in the near future.

One skeptic at the press conference characterized this as Facebook’s effort to “colonize the web.” I wouldn’t go that far, but these tools and capabilities expand Facebook’s potential reach and influence across the internet. I bet that publishers will broadly embrace and implement these tools, for whom the benefits are very tangible. Facebook Connect has been broadly embraced because it offers clear benefits to publishers. These new tools go further to make any site much more social.

Facebook will eventually be sitting on a mountain of secondary data or metadata: favorite restaurants, places, musicians and many more categories of information. All this data will be structured and associated with its millions and millions of users. What it does or doesn’t do with that information and data will also be interesting to watch. Facebook executives denied there was any associated monetization scheme in the wings. We’ll see.

The phrase “semantic metadata” was mentioned several times throughout the keynote. And the vision of a web of connected identities and associated data leads to some interesting possibilities — even search opportunities.

However, the vision here is a network of discovery tools and information that operate higher up in the funnel than search: what are my friends doing, where are they eating, what do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search. But it does represent an alternative way in many cases to discover information.

Yet the mountains of data that Facebook will gain could improve Facebook search results and potentially the coming, new and improved Bing integration. At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.

But this is all speculation on my part right now. Because Facebook doesn’t have a really good search experience it remains less “useful” than Google. But it is possible to imagine a much improved Bing integration combined with data and metadata gleaned from millions of profiles and “Likes” across the internet — making Facebook a more personal, more social and much better “discovery engine” than it is today.

Source: Greg Sterling for SearchEngineLand

Breaking News: Internet connects people

Hi my name is Fabienne and I am an internet addict. I met internet in the 90s. Remember those days? The sound of the dial-up modem connecting? Wasn't that so exciting? And this great AOL voice: Welcome! You've got Mail! And the sound of IMing?



And all these page with text from left to right? No IA. Few images. No videos. No Flash. Just text. And mostly from people who had found there a new place to share what was important for them.

If you think about it, the web has been created as a communication network. OK, military at first but then quickly opening to academics and later on to civilians. Then, years later, business jumped on the band wagon and the web became sort of The Mall of Internet.
If you were there in the 90s you probably remember the homy and laid back feel internet had at the time.
There was probably a time where you could do a full tour of the internet in a few hours or a few days. And actually get in touch with people all over the world.

Then it grew. It exploded. It became both a bazaar where spam and scams are the kings and a place where nobodies could gain some fame just for being famous. Yes, I know it's a weird one, Darwin gave life to s new specie: famous nobodies who haven't done anything.
OK, there were also some great things happening like YouTube or Facebook or Twitter and blogs.
And somehow we're back full circle to communication. To connecting with people. It's all about social networks these days. Sharing information. Connecting. Sounds familiar?

if you look beyond the annoying noise (the inept ramblings of D-list lost souls and famous nobodies, and shameless pseudo marketing) and the armless self centered postings (I am the King of Foursquare! I got the latest iPhone app!), you'll realize that internet and social media are actually playing a fundamental role in giving a voice to those who don't have one.
I recently discovered a site that does just that: GlobalVoices.org.

In their own words: Global Voices is a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.

Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.

Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices.

So next time you get fed up or bored with what you see on internet, and before you start singing "Internet is for Porn", go to Global Voices read some posts and have a thought for how useful the internet can be. It's a fantastic tool to connect people and share information. But like any tool, it only does what it's used for.

Twestival, real world meets virtual one

Do you know Twestival? Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. It's a great example of a physical extension to an online event, in this case to support a charitable cause.... We've all heard of or attended virtual events like concerts (U2 in Second ife anybody?) or political or social events. It's a unique way to share an experience.



Twestival brings this concept one step further by letting people around the world organize local physical events to raise funds and create awareness for a good cause. In 2009 it was @charitywater and this year's events are supporting education. Visit their site or follow @twestival to see how you can contribute between 2 virtual events!

Search Engines Design: a walk down memory lane from the 90s to today

Jacob Gube, Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisionhas put together this awesome visual showing the evolution of search engines design from the 1990s to today. Some of them are not around anymore and it's nice to see them again, thanks to the wayback machine.
I used to love dogpile! Anyway, have a look... warning: nostalgia may get you!

The future of Augmented-Reality Maps

OK, I love TED Talks, in fact I could spend my days watching their talks. In other words, I need an avatar to take care of the mundane things of life such as going to work while I can actually do interesting things! In the meantime, fresh from the TED2010 conference: here is an amazing talk by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, in which he demonstrates how Photosynth software is transforming cartography into a user experience: first by stitching static photos together to create zoomable, navigatable spaces, then with superimposed video for a swear-you-are-there experience.

Geolocation, geolocation, geolocation…. the new credo

Despite the controversy surrounding Foursquare and the likes still heating up - see PleaseRobMe.com coverage in the news i.e. is it really a good idea to broadcast to the world the fact that you are not home for an extended period of time? - more established social tools are adding rushing to add geolocation to their arsenal of capabilities.
With SXSW just around the corner, the timing is crucial and everybody is in the starting blocks, from Twitter to Facebook.

So what is the real motivation behind this new trend? Of course there is the goal to create a more appealing experience for users: the social factor aspect -seeing where your friends are, sharing tips on places, getting local news about what is happening around you- as well as the fun aspect like with Foursquare points system that gets you free stuff. But I suspect that interesting and entertaining users is just the tip of the iceberg.

The real money to be made here is in geolocated, real time and (more or less) relevant to your interests, advertisement. Isn't that every marketer dream to be able to talk to you about her offer just when you are thinking about it and happen to be close to it?

So that will probably be the price to pay to use these services: accept to be the target of personalized advertisement. But then again, aren't we getting increasingly trained to ignore those, therefore pushing marketers to find new ways to get our attention and pushing further the technology.

But the beauty of it all is that users seem to be far from passive spectators and always find ways to high-jack these new capabilities for their own benefit: think Twitter becoming a local information leader or crowdfunding.

Visit www.brainpickings.org for a good article about the crowdfunding landscape.

FBI ‘s most wanted fugitives list makes it into social media

The famous list turns 60 on March 14 this year and definitely knows how to get its message out and get tips from the public. With the large exposure given to this list by the new communication tools available to the FBI has well has to wannabe onlookers, being on the list is becoming a heavier burden every day!

• Twitter: 31,416 followers for breaking news tweets

• Facebook: 18,601 fans for updates and video

• Iphone App: 736,806 downloads in first year

• E-mail updates: More than 150,000 address

For mode details on the list's history and current top 10 most wanted list, go visit the FBI site.

Still don’t understand what Twitter is useful for?

Leaving aside marketing endeavors or knowledge sharing, we've already seen how Twitter beats traditional media for real time information updates from people at the the heart of the action. Think wild fires in California, earthquake in Haîti, protestations in Iran, and Eurostar breakdowns.

Here is a real life example of another facet of Twitter's usefulness: propagating the news of someone disappearance and looking for information. Because of the mass of readers it reaches, it is a great complement to things lie the Amber alerts on US highways for missing kids or the Police scrolling messages on French television (also for kids). Now nothing exists for missing adults (besides Without a Trace that is) so we see more and more cases of friends and family tweeting about their missing ones to reach out to them or get information.

Case in point: Headline- Depressed Growing Pains Star Andrew Koenig Vanishes in Vancouver

The parents of Andrew Koenig—who played Growing Pains neighbor Boner Stabone—say their son was "suffering from depression" at the time of his disappearance. Last seen on Valentine's Day, the star was in Vancouver.

Koenig—who hails from a Hollywood family (his father was Chekov in Star Trek)—was last seen February 14, when he stayed at the home of Vancouver burlesque star Jenny Magenta, who has since updated her MySpace status to "anxious" and tweeted about suicidal friends. With the Twitter effect, more and more people are propagating this quest and hopefully the story will have a good ending.





In conclusion, like many new products, Twitter has found it's own unique place in our little networked world, far from its original"What are you doing?" concept to inform close friends about the flavor of your morning coffee.

Now you know. Twitter is about: "What's happening?". So use it to spread first hand information you can have or stay in tune with what is happening in the world.

Source: www.gawker.com

Virtual travel: the final frontier?

Google's new video map of the Trans-Siberian Railway is a thing of beauty, says Benji Lanyado, but can virtual travel ever replace the real thing?

Yesterday I browsed the Trans-Siberian Railway. Yup, browsed it. I loitered on the platform at Yaroslavsky station before accelerating into identikit Muscovite suburbs, then glided across the Volga, raced through the Lower Urals, sped across the Barguzin Mountains, before pulling up in Vladivostok a few minutes later.

My humble steed, of course, was the wonderful new map-cum-video guide unveiled by Google Russia and Russian railways. The project sews together a series of videos shot from the window of a Trans-Siberian carriage as it spans the 5,752-mile length of the world's most famous long-distance railway.

Various images and bite-sized history lessons pop up along the way, and, from time to time, the window seat footage is complemented by city video tours courtesy of the perky Yelena Abitayeva. Even the soundtrack is considered - with optional Russian radio, balalaika music, Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace read in Russian, or simply the rumbling of the train wheels.

Desktop travelling has become an increasingly all-inclusive experience over the past few years. There was a time when all we had were actual holiday snaps. Then came online albums and video clips, usually aimed at office-bound friends on Facebook.

Then it got a bit weird. Rather than risking the imperfection of a real-life holiday, people began living out their getaways virtually, saving up their Linden dollars for a holiday home on the outer rim of a floating unicorn island on Second Life.

Then we were all at it, escaping grey Tuesday mornings for a 360-degree peek around the Vancouver Winter Olympics venues, or for a wander around stately British landmarks. And then we all started hooking our brains up to wires and transporting into worlds populated by strangely attractive blue people and exploring the floating mountains of Pandora on dragons and... oh, wait.

There's only so far this can go, really. For now, anyway. But it's fun. As far as I'm concerned there's every reason to get deeply excited about video-maps of the outskirts of Irkutsk, and yes, these desktop adventures probably can go some way to sating our ever-itching, increasingly penniless wanderlust.

And there's that gnawing evolutionary thing, too. If seeing distant lands is increasingly unaffordable and/or unsustainable, perhaps these online portals are the best we can hope for. And when things of beauty like the Trans-Siberian map arrive - watch as dawn breaks through columns of steel over the Zeya river - I begin to wonder: could this ever replace the real thing?

Could rather odd little projects like Twinity, which aim to create virtual, navigable versions of cities across the world, be the cut-price holiday fad of the future?



Hmmm. On second thoughts, hopefully not.

Source: Benji Lanyado for guardian.co.uk

THE FUTURE: Take A Picture Of A Word In A Foreign Language And Google Will Translate It For You

Google is working on a text translator for its experimental mobile app Goggles, the company announced today.

Google Goggles analyzes pictures taken with a mobile phone, then runs a Google search on objects it recognizes. When this feature goes live, it will also recognize text in pictures, and, when that text is in a foreign language, run it through Google Translate.

At the moment, the feature can only handle German-to-English translation, and Google says it "is not yet ready for prime time." Google won't be the first company to tackle this, however. Fotozio's PicTranslator for the iPhone already translates from 16 languages.

Here's a demo of the new feature in action:



Source: www.businessinsider.com

Social media is the new search engine

Web measurement firm Compete Inc recently announced that Facebook has overtaken Google as the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN. Analysts say that as people spend less time browsing the Internet on their own, and more time basing their Internet time on recommendations from friends, social media begins to surpass traditional search engines in being a major driver of web traffic.

This change in dynamic may shift advertisers' focus significantly. Although search engines offer a great way of providing directed content for advertisers, consumers spend the vast majority of their time at their destination on the web, not on search pages. SEO isn't gone for good, but keep your eyes peeled for new, innovative methods used to harness the marketing potential of social media.

Sources:
www.sfgate.com
holykaw.alltop.com

2010 Digital Revolution Trends: Special drum roll for humanitarian microjobs

I always claim that the biggest revolution brought by the net is ethnological and sociological. This year findings from Netexploratrend are supporting my beliefs.

After the 2009's "Web to the World"trend (how the web allows us to interact in the physical world), 2010 is the year of the "Spray World" (how the web cloud is surrounding us and melts the frontier between physical and virtual worlds).

Netexploratrend identifies 4 sub trends: the emergence of the GreenNet (how the Green Business is taking over Green Tree Huggers), the Catchmarketing (online tracking), Insight Command (evolution of the interaction user/technology) and Microjobs (micro tasks outsourced online).

In this latest category, I want to highlight the humanitarian microjob project "Give Work", created by Leila Janah, President of Samasource. Basically you perform a small task online that will be used to train refugees in diverse camps in Africa. Once they reach a 75% accuracy rate, they become workers and get paid. In the mean time, your work finances their training.
There is even an iPhone app for that! So between these Bejeweled 2 games, put your iPhone to useful work!

Sources:
lafemmedigitale.fr/
netexplorateur.org/
samasource.com

The 3 Oddest Apple-Themed Products

Apple fandom has inspired a generation of designers to create products that complement, contrast or clash with design guru Jonathan Ive’s cleverly thought out consumer electronics.

Mashable.com pulled together a list of Apple-themed products — both real and conceptual –- that ooze wit, and celebrate those that nod to the fun side of life in their product designs.

Here is my Top 3:

1- iClooly iPhone Stand


The iClooly stand makes your iPhone or iPod touch look just like a mini-me for your iMac. Described as “the perfect little buddy for your iMac,” the iClooly is made out of aluminum and features a 90-degree pivot joint to hold your favorite gadget in landscape or portrait mode. It also offers tilt functionality, and a speaker cable cut-out. So cute!

Cost: $39

2- TwelveSouth BookBook

So you’ve got a MacBook right? Well the BookBook hardback leather case for MacBooks and MacBook Pros makes your Apple laptop look just like that, providing not only protection, but a cunning disguise for your pricey portable.

Cost: $79.99

3- Notepod

Originally designed for iPhone developers to get a to-scale, real-life canvas to sketch their app ideas and designs on, the Aussie creators behind the Notepods also suggest they are ideal for “jotting down the phone number of a hot geek,” so good luck with that. At the very least, they might make for a good conversation starter.

Cost: $17.95

Source: www.mashable.com

Google Maps suggest new places you might like

Google keeps adding new features to Google Maps and Google Earth. The latest: As of today you can type in a restaurant or other place you like in Google Maps and receive recommendations of nearby places you might like just as much or more.

Sure, it’s not quite as radical as something like the rumored store interior pics in Google Street View, but it’s always good to see more robust location services. Yelp offers something vaguely similar with a “people who viewed this also viewed” box, but Google’s algorithm is probably more sophisticated.

Google has beaten location-focused services like Foursquare to the punch with this. That’s too bad, because we imagine Foursquare could in theory use your check-in history to provide much better suggestions just like Netflix suggests films based on which movies you’ve already rented or streamed and how you’ve rated them. It’s not surprising that Google did it first, though; Google has a lot more experience using algorithms to determine what you’re looking for than Yelp or Foursquare do.

Google wasn’t very clear about how its algorithm works in its blog post on the subject. You’ll just have to try it for yourself to see if the results are helpful to you, but your mileage may vary.

We viewed the place page for the Indie Cafe sushi and Asian fusion restaurant on the far north side of Chicago and received a bunch of — you guessed it — sushi and Asian fusion restaurant suggestions in adjacent neighborhoods. But when we looked up Big City Swing dance studio in the same city, the results were a bit less precise. Some were great, like the Lincoln Tap Room and Tango Chicago. Others made a lot less sense, like a barber shop and other unrelated venues in a distant suburb almost an hour’s drive away.

Source: http://mashable.com

Gov 2.0: France 1 – US 0

Everybody agrees that Barack Obama was the first politic figure to (seem to) use web 2.0 during the presidential campaign as a way to enroll citizens in his campaign and leverage the grass root movement.
- And by the way, Barack Obama wasn't the only winner in November 2008 presidential election. Thomas Gensemer, whose company Blue State Digital managed Obama's slick online campaign, built his website my.barackobama.com, recruited 13.5 million supporters and raised $500m for the Obama campaign, is also doing very nicely out of the victory. He then moved on to the UK to help Gordon Brown and it's no surprise that the UK Prime Minister party is doing a great job at leveraging new technologies. -

To come back to Barack Obama, he was also the first one to create a position of Chief Technology Officer at the White Office. And he just innovated again when not only had he his State of the Union broadcasted live on YouTube but more interestingly in answering live, in real time, questions from citizens on YouTube. The questions were selected by YouTube staff and they swear that the President didn't know them before hand.
The interest of the exercise is not so much in getting questions directly from citizens: Clinton had done it on TV with MTV a few years ago.
No, what's interesting is the "real time" approach. The "live" factor. It creates a "real life" feeling. No security net. However, if web 2.0 is about creating a conversation, for once the French President maybe ahead in a twisted way.

Last week Sarkosy answered questions from a few French citizens, live, on a TV set, with the citizens in question being there and actually dialoguing with them. So from a technology point of view, nop, it's not web 2.0. It's TV 2.0. But neither is it when Obama just broadcasts his answers on the net, without opening the floor to real conversation. There is nothing 2.0 about that.

Without getting into politics, it's quite representative of Obama's approach. He seems to be cool and use web 2.0 to be close to his citizens, but it's all smokes and mirrors. He only broadcasts a controlled environment interview on the web instead of the cable. But then again nothing surprising from a man who does 90% of his speeches with teleprompters... even when he visits a 5th graders' classroom!

On the other hand, French politic actors are still figuring out how to use the technology. We had some terrible websites or FaceBook pages (Gensemer we need you!). But they get the 2.0 aspect. They do Pizza 2.0 parties where public elected figures invite citizens to talk with them.
Just this morning, they were on Twitter to comment on an interview of the Prime Minister on radio while it was taking place on the air. We are one step from forcing a debate on a single interviewee who no doubt will want to be able to address these comments from his adversaries.
Now that's interesting.

So in conclusion, the most important in gov 2.0 is not the use of the technology to use internet to broadcast staged event, it's the 2.0 dimension of creating a dialogue.

Why do you make unsubscribing from your mail lists so hard?

Oh, I know....Your marketing people want to say We have 2 million subscribers...Welll a cheer part of them are prisoners. And chances are: they hate your brand more and more every time they try to leave your newsletter and can't.
Have interesting info people are looking forward to read and they'll willingly subscribe to your newsletter. And please, if they change their heart and decide to become out of space explorers... let them unsubscribe!