A Fresh Start (up)

As you may have noticed, this blog has been going in every directions these past weeks. I created it a few months ago and was willing to wait until my expatriation to launch it, but I couldn’t resist and I started this blog by talking a lot about Internet stuff, as it is the sector I love, and because I was really focused on that those past few months.

But the Internet is not the only thing I would like to talk about; in fact I realize that I would like to be able to write about everything I like, everything that surprises me, everything that scares me. In a word, I would like to talk about my life, because it’s often what blogs written by a unique author are, and life is diverse, fortunately.

I have spent one week and a half in the US now and I can’t manage to catch up with Internet news, so at this moment I can’t say anything great about Internet stuff but I would love to talk about American educational system, about the difficulties of expatriation, about the fact of being immersed in a group of international people… And I will probably go back to tech subjects in a while because I’ve taken courses in Technology Management at UCLA which are really promising. And I’m still working on my thesis about the impact of the Internet on the art market so I will also bring cool stuff about it.  And I know that it is hard to find a consistency between Internet, entrepreneurship, digital art, expatriation and education topics, but the common thing they share is that they are all part of my life…

But I also know that I can’t ask my readers to be interested in everything I like, so I really don’t know what to do

In a word it would be great if you can give some feedback on the subject. Do you think that blogs have to be specialized so that readers know what to expect? Or that if you like a blog it’s because you like the author (:-)) and would be interested in knowing more about him/her on multiple topics?

PLEASE, I really need your comments to figure that out, and it can also bring an interesting discussion about what blogging really is.

OK, no scoop here, but for me it was an amazing moment: touching the iPhone and taking a picture of me with it in the Apple Store of Santa Monica… Here are two proofs of that:

A few words to sum up this day: Santa Monica rocks, but I was disappointed by Venice Beach which is a striking example of the inequalities of the American society. If you’re interested, you can see all the pictures here.

After months of preparation, stress, excitement and anxiety, I’m finally in L.A.! How to describe the first day of a new life? I must be born under a good star as everything went fine: in only one day, I checked into a beautiful studio, I visited UCLA and completed all the administrative tasks, I got my UCLA student card, I bought the traditional UCLA sweatshirt, I bought a US mobile phone, I opened a bank account, I found a Whole Food to buy some… food of course, and I even had time to make my first podcast at UCLA…

As I don’t want to convert this blog into a personal one (and it’s hard at the moment as I really want to share the experience of my expatriation), I will try to connect my experiences with some more interesting topics. For example, in this podcast, I explain the connection between UCLA and the Internet. The result is awful (horrible French accent, horrible face, awful quality, and I don’t understand why I move my head in all directions like that, that’s unbearable…) but I really want to make this blog more alive by adding podcasts, so hopefully it’ll get better with time ;-)

If you want to follow this expatriation step by step, you can see my Flickr pictures here and my Twitter feed here.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the fact that, with customization trends, everybody will soon need to develop design skills to make the most of user generated products. In my vision, designers were really powerful because they have the required skills to benefit completely from this new trend. But recently I read another article of Etienne Mineur (in French, but I will explain it here), which basically says that designers are becoming less and less powerful, especially since new templates and applications allows amateurs to control design without having design skills.

I think that what I said remains true: users have more options to customize things but the power stays between the hands of designers who have the skills to offer this choice. Without design skills, users just have more options to choose when they buy a product: when Freddy&Ma proposes to “design your own bag”, it just offers you some different options on the same bag (the one I customized on the picture is nice, right? ;-)) but not the real possibility of designing the bag of your dreams. But what I misunderstood is the fact that even if designers are more than required to create those templates, they can feel that they are loosing some power because they don’t have any control on the final product anymore. I recently read some management theories telling that the most important motivational factor was the feeling of being responsible for a whole project (which is why motivation was so low during Taylorism). So I can now understand designers’ feeling, at a time when they are becoming more “facilitators” than “makers”.

I don’t really know anything about design, but the most obvious solution would be that designers migrate towards services, by proposing their advice to project managers who want to have a total control on the final cut. But when it comes to mass market, they should follow the wave by proposing the best solutions for users to customize their products. In that scenario, users wouldn’t even feel the need of developing design skills on their own because they would have all the choice they need, and designers would keep the benefit of their technical skills.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about visualization tools where I said that these tools must either have a clear artistic purpose or must be really useful by improving understanding. Twitter blocks is none of them. I tried to understand the basic principles of this visualization, and it appears that it only allows you to see the timeline of the friends who have updated their Twitter feed recently. I didn’t even understand why some blocks are higher than others.

So why? With all the improvements that need to be done on Twitter, and the limited resources they have, why choose to develop a useless visualization tool, which brings nothing more to the core use of Twitter and which could have been developed by some artists via Twitter API?

The list of things to do is long enough: create groups to send direct messages (done by Twitter group but should be integrated to Twitter), create some tabs for different groups of people you are following, improve their people search engine…

Any idea what this visual app brings to Twitter? Did I miss something?

You really thought I wasn’t going to participate? For those who haven’t caught the vawe, Blogday is the day when bloggers can share with their readers 5 blogs they like, which helps making discover new blogs. I was also proud to be in the BlogDay selection of Tête au carré (thanks!). So here is my selection, among all my center of interests:

• eBay strategies: Ok, it’s not at all a new blog, but Scott Wingo is just amazing when it comes to analyse eBay current strategy, and as I’m still passionate about the company I interned in these past 6 months, I couldn’t miss this one.
• Inside the USA: the blog of a French expatriate who came bak from the US but who keep on commenting US news. Obviously, I couldn’t miss this one either.
• Qu’est ce que l’art aujourd’hui: again it is for French readers (really sorry for others) and it is about everything happening in contemporary art. It also proposes some great analysis about the market.
• Tourism Internet Marketing blog:  great blog about the tourism industry and its use of the Internet.
• Future of real estate marketing: a blog exploring Real Estate marketing and the impact of the Internet, Web 2.0 and blogging on the Real Estate industry.

Enjoy!

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!