A Fresh Start (up)

If, like me, you better understand a great image or chart than some text, you should have a look at the article I just published on Tech IT Easy about visualization tools for shopping, search and social networking.

Having added the Mybloglog widget on Tech IT Easy has shown me that Tech IT Easy and A Fresh Start (up) have almost the same loyal readership (even if I have less readers on the latest than on the first one of course!). But in case you don’t know Tech IT Easy yet, it is an amazing blog with amazing authors (of course I am one of them ;-)) founded by Jérémy Fain: if you are a Tech addict you must take a look at it, and if you think that you have interesting things to say about Tech do not hesitate to drop me or Jérémy an email to become part of our dream team of bloggers!

Ok, I must be addicted… Thanks to a reader of this blog I have discovered Meez.com, a website to create animated avatars really easy to export. To be sincere, I don’t understand how I missed it until now: they have the largest and the most beautiful collection of virtual goods for avatars that I have ever seen, except on Second Life but the advantage is that most of them are free on Meez! On the other hand, although I have claimed many times that I think that buying virtual goods is a stupid thing, I must acknowledge that I bought those little cute wings… So if I end up by buying those goods, I am pretty sure that it will attract lots of people…And I have also bought virtual gifts on Facebook, and all my Facebook friends seem to really enjoy it! Ok, it seems that I am now a converted person!

The best article on the market of virtual goods can be found here. I particularly agree with the fact that virtual goods create a real value for people. On Facebook for example, especially for birthdays, it means “I won’t go through the pain of buying a cheap gift and pay expensive shipping to send it to you, but I care enough to give you a little something on your birthday; and this little gift displayed on your profile will show your network that your friends care”. On avatar services, the fact of buying additional items is just part of human narcissism: I really wanted my avatar to be really cute, and I have been caught by the great colors of these wings so the cheap price paid was worth the value. Besides, the fact of having a Paypal account make the transaction so quick that it removes all the hassle.

So what do you think? Will the market of virtual goods keep on booming? Will it be sufficient to make profitable “avatar services” without resorting to advertising?

I am starting to do a lot of research concerning my working paper about “Internet: a way to democratize contemporary art?” so do not be surprised if you see more Net art-related posts on this blog…

Today I stumbled upon Mr Picassohead, a website allowing you to create your Picasso painting or avatar based on Picasso style shapes. You can check all the other users’ creations here, some are really great.

When I discover this type of sites I always wonder if it is a cool idea from a developer willing to make something fun, or a real artistical project with a social purpose (like for example democratizing Picasso’s style by making it interactive). After the reading I have done on Net art it seems that it is often the second one, but it is not obvious for the user, and sometimes it would be great to add a bit of background about the real meaning of the program. What do you think?

You already know that I am a Twitter fan, but I always regretted that Twitter still had some shortcomings which could be easily corrected. Which is why I have been really happy to see that 3 of these shortcomings have been “solved”:

- You may have noticed that the frequency of bugs has been decreasing dramatically in the last few weeks, and it is definitely a great improvement for such an addictive service.

- You are not obliged anymore to go to Tinyurl to shorten your urls and then paste them on Twitter: it is now done automatically, which is a great time gain.

- Finally, it is not an improvement made by the Twitter team but by an external developer and it is GREAT: you can now send direct messages to groups of Twitter users with Twitter groups. It is one of the features that made a lot of people say that Pownce was better than Twitter, but I was sure that it was just a matter of time for Twitter to provide the same useful service. It is now a done thing!

I hope I still manage to convince some of you to start Twittering, and you can follow me here on Twitter!

For a very long time I have been trying to prove to my friends that I’m not a geek. But my reaction when I saw my Moo stickers in the mail today definitely ruins my attempts to convince them!

Moo, a UK start-up which had launched a printing on mini-cards service, has recently added to its offer some stickerbooks: you can basically convert your Flickr (and other photo sharing services) photos into stickers. As you can see I can now stick my head and my boyfriend’s everywhere, on postcards, on gifts… (I have plenty of ideas, but I have to select the least kitsch ones!). Of course it can be used in different ways: you can use any picture you want, so for example you can have stickers with famous paintings. I will also probably order my mother’s shop logo and she will stick her stickers on all the wraps she will make. Both mini-cards and stickers have generated creative ideas among users who have created a Flickr group here.

In my “Pieces of art” serie, a cool trend I want to speak about: it is what I call “community art”.

Sites giving access to their API have allowed programmers to interact with their data, and with users’ pictures among other things.

It has resulted in great things in terms of artistic initiatives: you can see in this article a mosaic of my picture made with thousands of Flickr pictures thanks to the Mosaic Generator. Of couse it is too small to be seen here but you’ll see the result with your picture.

The same thing is being made through Twitter API by Twitter Mosaic, a Twitter user who convert pictures into thousands of Twitter users’ pictures. I even had the honor of having my picture used in one of his mosaics