Internet & online culture
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S i vous avez l’habitude de lire les chroniques relatives aux nouvelles technologies, il y a de fortes chances que vous ayez déjà été confronté à ce que j’ai coutume d’appeler le «syndrome de la très chère mère». Cela arrive lorsqu’un journaliste spécialiste en informatique (le genre de type capable de passer des heures à vous parler des dernières innovations en matière de routeurs sans fils) écrit sur un appareil de type Kindle ou iPad, c'est-à-dire destiné à séduire le grand public. Il commence généralement par vanter l’intuitivité de l’interface et la facilité du paramétrage, mais finit par trouver que cette description ne suffit pas à rendre compte de la prodigieuse simplicité du produit. Il sort donc l’argument massue: c’est un produit si simple que même ma mère pourrait s’en servir.
2011, annus horribilis pour la technologie
Le succès de Google tient en deux algorithmes : l’un, qui permet de trouver des pages répondant à certains mots, l’a rendu populaire ; l’autre, qui affecte à ces mots une valeur marchande, l’a rendu riche. La première de ces méthodes de calcul, élaborée par MM. Larry Page et Sergey Brin alors qu’ils étaient encore étudiants en thèse à l’université Stanford (Californie), consistait en une nouvelle définition de la pertinence d’une page Web en réponse à une requête donnée. En 1998, les moteurs de recherche étaient certes déjà capables de répertorier les pages contenant le ou les mots demandés. Mais le classement se faisait souvent de façon naïve, en comptabilisant le nombre d’occurrences de l’expression cherchée.
Quand les mots valent de l’or, par Frédéric Kaplan
The End of the World: The State vs. the Internet
A while back, I thought I saw a tweet from Evgeny Morozov that said something to the effect: “You don’t just go from printing press to Renaissance to iPad; there are revolutions and wars in between you can’t ignore.”
Why Millennials Don't Want To Buy Stuff
Compared to previous generations, Millennials seem to have some very different habits that have taken both established companies and small businesses by surprise. One of these is that Generation Y doesn't seem to enjoy purchasing things. The Atlantic 's article " Why Don't Young Americans Buy Cars?
The real problem with Facebook’s Timeline « remarkedly
I still remember how much controversy the Facebook Newsfeed created when it was released several years ago. People worked themselves into frenzies about privacy and threatened to deactivate. Few people actually did, and ultimately the Newsfeed became one of the most dynamic (and addicting) elements of the whole Facebook platform. Could the uproar about Facebook’s new “Timeline” feature be the same type of issue?
Every day three-quarters of all e-mail that flies across the Internet is spam. Some of it tricks customers into installing a virus or forking over personal information to use illicitly. But many spam messages are advertisements for companies that sell real goods, usually prescription drugs, knock-off watches, and pirated software. Millions of Americans see it as a way to save on drugs. “You pay the money, and you get a product,” says Stefan Savage, computer science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Over several years, Savage has helped bring together a team of more than a dozen researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego to try to understand the economics of spam.
Spam Works
Clinton presses companies, governments to protect Internet freedom
Clinton urges private companies to consider how their products are used by governments She points to examples of Internet technology used to repress dissent Clinton speaks at Internet freedom conference in the Netherlands She has made Internet freedom a cornerstone of her foreign policy
Am I addicted to the internet? Maybe, but so what?
Every so often, a new study comes out that says people are “addicted” to the internet, or to digital tools, or social media — describing their anguish when cut off from these services in the same way that smokers or alcoholics react when prevented from smoking or drinking. The latest is research from a UK survey company that asked 1,000 respondents to go without internet access for 24 hours , and found that more than half of those surveyed were “upset.” But is this really that surprising? Surely by now it’s become obvious that internet access and all it brings with it is a core function of modern life, like the telephone or the automobile. Talking about it in terms of “addiction” misses the point.
The Smart-Talk Trap in the Era of Social Media (and What to Do About It)
I just came across an excellent piece in the Harvard Business Review thanks to my colleague Larry Pixa. Published in 1999 by Stanford professors Pfeffer and Sutton, “The Smart-Talk Trap” ( PDF ) is even more pertinent in today’s new media world where user-generated content is ubiquitous. The key to success is action but the authors warn that we are increasingly “rewarded for talking—and the longer, louder, and more confusingly, the better.” This dynamic, which substitutes talk for action, is responsible for what Pfeffer and Sutton call the knowing-doing gap. The purpose of this blog post is to assess this gap in the context of social media and to offer potential solutions. “When confronted with a problem, people act as if discussing it, formulating decisions, and hashing out plans for action are the same as actually fixing it.Journalism
Crise des medias
Journalisme d'investigation sur le Net
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