Recently in lesblogs Category

From the Herald Tribune: France's mysterious embrace of blogs - Technology - International Herald Tribune

Already famed for angry labor strikes and philosophical debates in smoke-filled cafés, the French have now brought these passions online to become some of the world's most intensive bloggers

Why is that? Yes, the French do have this historical tendency to rebel against authority and at the same time to favor highly centralized forms of government. but I think the real reason why French people blog so much is because they have their guru. Loïc is doing an amazing job at spreading the bloging phenomenon in our country. The fact that he has a vested interest in this as an executive of and investor in Six Apart is relevant too.

"It is clear that in France we have very large egos and love to speak about ourselves," Le Meur said

LOL :-D

From Miss Rogue about the LesBlogs2.0 event taking place as I write:

I think we may be close to breaking the record in this room for the number of people having a backend conversation around the conversation without even having a conversation at all.

No more classrooms. School's out [grin]

A few ideas grabbed here and there:

From Jochen Wegner, Germany, Technology Editor Focus Magazine.
There are 100 000 weblogs in Germany. A very tiny blogging phenomenon, with not one impact blog. Why? Because Germany is a reputation-driven country of elites.

[Personal comment: This is strange. In his homelies, Benedikt XVI has talked several times about what he calls social communications. If a 78 year old german pope "gets it" how come younger germans don't?]

Yann Chapellon, France, Le Monde Interactif
The blog service at Le Monde opened for subscribers in october 2004
Moderation: 5 people (large number!) 200 blogs are now updated every day.

You have to pay to be a blogger on Le Monde. You are educated to attract traffic. You have to agree on a charter of conduct and not promote parties, churches or anything.

[Personal comment: On the chat, one reaction was with Le Monde, "you pay to have your blog censored". Yes and no. You pay to have your blog censored AND you pay to have the "Le Monde" brand name and endorsement on your blog]

Form Pierre Bellanger, France, Skyrock). Skyrock Radio has 4 million listeners per day in the the 13-24 age group. The Skyrock web site attracts 1.3 billion impression on the intranet - 9 million unique visitors - The free blog service Skyblog started in 2002, with an advertising-based business model. So far 1.8 million skyblogs have been created and thousands of posts are published each day. The 13-24 is the first generation to use the internet as a normal tool and the first to really understand the community aspect. Says Pierre:

We used to be a radio station with an audience. Now we have become a community with a radio station

From the discussion: A question was raised about Skyrock's reponsibility regarding education.
Pierre's answer:
1- We abide by the law and filter all posts conveying antisemitism, hate, paedophilia and the like. We moderate, but we cannot moderate too much. It's about keywords, cybercop, and moderation on pictures (10 people). We delete pictures whenever there is a complaint.
2- We have a charter of conduct and we cancel publising rights to people who do not comply.
3- We are concerned by ethical questions: some blogs talk about suicide and anorexia. Thus we feel ourselves compelled to work with associations.

[Personal Comment: I was a little concerned just now about linking to Skyblog. So far, I have always linked to sites I had good reasons to trust. I don't know what to think about Skyblog. It's obviously a benchmark, but is that enough to endorse it by linking to it?]

Doc Searles Author of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

The FCC can regulate broadcasting, defined as "moving content". On the other hand "speech in a place" is protected by the first amendment. So the way we define blogs, the words we use, start to matter if we want to protect ourselves under the first amendment.

Deeper meaning is conveyed through metaphors, borrowed vocabulary. Time is talked about in terms of money; life in terms of travel; business, politics, sports in terms of war (the war box is the most popular in many ways)

For blogs we have three metaphors
1- It's about shipping ("content")
2- It's about real estate ("design", "sites", "addresses")
3- It's about writing. ("journals")

It's about writing. There's nothing wrong with the two other metaphors, but if we present ourselves as content providers we will fall under the FCC rules. "Big C" (Copyright) people want to regulate "content", churches and lobbyist want to restrict "content". They assume we are consumers. We are not. We are producers.

Blogs are by readers and writers for readers and writers. They don't "deliver information", they inform. We are all authors of each other. Authority is measured by Google and Technorati by inbound links. It is both earned and granted. Thus the blogosphere goes beyond democracy. Blogs, like Open source, are the demand side supplying itself. Blogging grows from protocols, standards, and practices, not just by raw number of users. In the blogospheres, traffic and stickiness are irrelevant, hyperlinks and trackbacks are.

Blogging is about rolling snowballs downhill, rather than pushing rocks uphill

In conclusion, we need to see the net as a place, not as a medium.

The Cluetrain has hardly left the station

PS: Doc's presentation can be found here

Ideas grabbed here and there:

From Stowe Boyd, US, Corante - Corante is a traditional media in blog clothing. It is a federation of independent like-minded consultants (the Corante network) using one single blog platform as their collective publishing medium

From the discussion: Social medias work bottom up. Blogs are unfiltered, full of spelling errors. Bloggers are artists, "individuals pursuing their own muses"... Blog readers have little expectations regarding content, whereas readers of established media do. Thus the established media must protect their brand equity by only circulating validated and refined content.

[personal comment: I was surprised that nobody in the panel talked about the importance of branding. All media, all blogs, all web sites carry a brand (Mopsos for this one). Whether it is established or not, a brand means something - or it should ;-) - A successful brand conveys a strong identity, a "plot" as Tom Peters would put it. It is very difficult, and it takes time, to build a strong collective brand like Time Magazine. But for a personal blog, it is far easier, because only the author is involved, and there can be many trials and errors. That's why I use Mopsos instead of my name. I don't want to be equated to the Mopsos brand, which represents only one aspect of my personality.]