PROJET AUTOBLOG


Ploum

source: Ploum

⇐ retour index

The Ghost Web

dimanche 6 janvier 2013 à 22:41

Firefox scary party

September 13, 2013

Firefox 22 is released, just in time to become the default browser in Ubuntu 13.10. The release contains many performance improvements and one big, major feature : a built-in version of adblock enabled by default.

In July, Ars Technica revealed that there was a major disagreement between Mozilla and Google. The search giant decided to stop funding Firefox, because of Chrome’s success and defending Chromium as the preferred alternative. Gossips said that Google was also angry about the performance of Google+ in Firefox, which was, according to a survey, one of the major complain for not switching to G+.

Tech blogs were happy to jump on that story, predicting Mozilla’s dead. A petition was even sent to Google, begging to keep Firefox alive.

But Mozilla had more power than everyone thought. They prove it now with Firefox 22.

It is often said that the default configuration is the most important. Most users don’t install extension or modify the settings. With Firefox 22, 30% of the web surfers will suddenly discover a new web : clean, usable, fast and consuming a lot less data while mobile surfing.

To avoid false positives, the filter is far from being aggressive. But it’s a win anyway : the most obvious, intrusive ads are removed. Including all the Adsense and Doubleclick ones. Reviewers are already praising this move: “It brings to the casual user what is usually referred as the usable web by  the nerd-adblock-enabled elite” or “Despite all the debate, enabling by default a technology used for years by the vast majority of power users is a natural evolution”.

Firefox 22 also bring a small improvement : if you have enabled the Do Not Track feature, which is a default since Firefox 19, you will now block statistic tools, including Google Analytics…

All those changes are well explained in the Firefox start page the first time you start Firefox 22 (or after the upgrade). The user is explained how to consult the list of blocked website and how to whitelist some site. There’s also a prominent button called “Don’t block anything”. According to an early survey, very few users click on it.

A spokesman for a Fortune100 company using Firefox in all their workstations commented the move: “During their work time, we want our employees to be 100% concentrated on their task. Avoiding the distraction of ads will increase productivity and save us bandwidth. We also welcome the enhanced privacy.”

Professional bloggers and technical websites are calling for a boycott of Firefox. In lengthy articles, they explain how 50% of their visitors are using Firefox and how they will disappear. Arguments and tone are very similar to what we could read when the music industry complained about Napster condemning musical artists to starvation. Some take a more positive approach and try to convince their readers to whitelist them.

Nevertheless, Opera is rumored to follow in a upcoming release. And Canonical announced the same day that the first Ubuntu phone will be shipped in 2014Q1 with Firefox 22 as the default browser.

In the Mountain View building, it looks like 30% of the web suddenly disappeared. Statistics, ads revenues : they don’t exist anymore but still visit websites, consume resources. Googlers already call them “the ghost web”. Some says that the ongoing negotiations with a small Swedish company are not unrelated.

Will it kill the dream of a Google’s world? Will it fulfill Mozilla’s mission of “building a better web” or, on the opposite, kill the professional web?

Picture by Firefox Flicks

Mais qui paie la publicité ?

vendredi 4 janvier 2013 à 12:25

Panneau publicitaire

Si je vous avais dit, hier, que la publicité n’était pas un modèle économique viable, vous m’auriez rit au nez. Aujourd’hui, avec l’activation d’une fonctionnalité techniquement très simple dans sa Freebox, le fournisseur Free lance un pavé dans la mare d’une manière on ne peut plus cavalière.

Je dois avouer que, dans cette histoire, je n’arrive pas à m’intéresser à l’aspect neutralité des réseaux. Je laisserai Benjamin Bayart s’en charger et je rappellerai que lorsque j’installais Ubuntu autour de moi, je mettais AdBlock par défaut, même si la personne ne le savait pas. Et que, finalement, Free ne fait pas autre chose.

Mais le plus rigolo dans cette histoire c’est l’inquiétude sourde que l’on sent poindre chez ceux qui vivent de la publicité.

Le modèle économique de la publicité

Quatre acteurs sont impliqués dans une relation publicitaire : l’annonceur, qui souhaite vendre un produit, une boisson gazeuse par exemple, le support, typiquement un site web ou un journal gratuit, la cible, c’est-à-dire le lecteur comme vous et moi et le publicitaire, qui va faire l’intermédiaire entre l’annonceur et le support. Google est, sur le web, un de ces intermédiaires.

L’annonceur paie donc une somme d’argent au publicitaire. Celui-ci en rétrocède une petite partie au support. L’objectif étant que la cible paie au final une somme plus importante à l’annonceur.

Soit la publicité ne fonctionne pas et, dans ce cas, L’annonceur fait vivre à ses frais un publicitaire et des supports. Soit elle fonctionne et c’est la cible qui fait vivre tout ce petit monde.

Et si la publicité était inefficace ?

Lorsqu’on interroge les cibles, vous et moi, les réponses sont unanimes : la publicité ne fonctionne pas. Peut-être chez les gens moins intelligents mais pas chez moi.

Les cibles en sont tellement convaincues qu’elles vont jusqu’à activer les publicités volontairement sur les sites qu’elles soutiennent. Pire, certains vont jusqu’à afficher des publicités pour soutenir des œuvres caritatives.

Tout cela sur base sur le postulat que la publicité n’est pas efficace, que nous sommes insensible à son message. Il y a également une certaines satisfaction à savoir que l’annonceur, gros producteur capitaliste de boisson gazeuse, va indirectement payer pour notre site préféré ou une œuvre caritative.

Les conséquences d’un postulat

Or, cette inefficacité est illusoire. La publicité ne fait pas appel à notre raison ni à notre intelligence mais à des réflexes primaires ancestraux et inconscients. La publicité va jusqu’à modifier notre perception du goût !

D’ailleurs, si la publicité était si peu efficace, notre annonceur ne dépenserait pas des millions, que dis-je, des milliards.

En conséquence de quoi, en activant les publicités sur votre site préféré, vous allez donner 1€ à l’annonceur, lequel paiera 10 centimes au publicitaire qui, lui-même, donnera 1 misérable centime à votre site. Votre contribution d’un centime à votre site préféré vous aura coûté 1€ et, pire, vous aurez fait vivre un annonceur et un publicitaire, ce qui n’était peut-être pas votre but.

De plus, en encourageant ce système vous pervertissez l’indépendance de votre site préféré, même si le site lui-même n’en est pas toujours conscient. C’est la fameuse course à l’audience. Les chiffres deviennent plus importants que la qualité.

La contribution directe

Si vous souhaitez soutenir un site particulier, contribuez-y directement si c’est possible. Wikipédia n’a jamais fait autre chose.

Personnellement, après un test d’un mois en 2007, j’ai décidé de me passer de la publicité pour les raisons que je viens d’expliquer. J’ai cependant la chance de recevoir quelques euros tous les mois grâce aux dons de mes lecteurs via Flattr.

Il est intéressant de constater que les billets qui me rapporte le plus d’argent ne sont pas toujours ceux qui font le plus d’audience mais ceux qui apportent quelque chose de neuf ou d’un peu fouillé comme ce billet ou celui-ci.

L’avantage de la contribution directe, c’est que votre argent va à 100% (90% dans le cas de Flattr) au site que vous soutenez et que votre esprit est assez libre pour décider de boire de l’eau du robinet plutôt qu’une boisson gazeuse dont vous n’avez pas réellement besoin.

La publicité n’est pas spécialement négative

Mais il ne faut pas non plus refuser toute publicité. Après tout, quand je parle de services privés comme Flattr ou Medium, je leur fait de la publicité. Une publicité qui se veut informative mais une publicité quand même.

C’est ce que Google a bien compris et tente, au fil des années, de faire : développer une publicité qui correspondrait à vos besoins et à vos goûts, qui ne soit pas intrusive mais juste adaptée et informative. Une publicité qui, finalement, n’aurait plus raison d’être bloquée car pertinente.

Je sais que cette vision du futur en fait frémir plus. Une publicité qui se conformerait à nos esprits ? Quelle horreur ! Mais peut-être est-ce préférable à la situation actuelle où nos esprits se conforment à la publicité.

 

Photo par Chris Goldberg

Stay on top of your inbox in 2013

jeudi 3 janvier 2013 à 15:49

Chances are that, in 2012, you’ve spent more time than you wished “checking your email”. Those days, going back to work after one week of vacations often means that you will spend the next two days dealing with your email backlog only. No wonder why people communicate more and more through Facebook or Twitter messages : email is now a daunting nightmare, something that reminds you everyday that you are swamped in a life you don’t control anymore.

inboxes

Let’s take 2013 as an opportunity for a fresh start. I will give you a few rules to follow. Give it a try for one month. One full month and I promise you will start to love email again. Last year, I was receiving approximately between 40 and 80 emails a day. Keeping a neat inbox was taking me several hours each morning.
1. Inbox 0

Inbox 0 is a well known method. Every mail should go out of your inbox as quickly as possible. After reading an email, you should archive it immediately if there is no action, answer it immediately if needed or create an action in your todo list and archive the email.

Lot of people tell me that they are doing the same with the read/unread status. This is not the same! Even if an email is read, it sits there, catching your attention, reminding your subconscious about something. So let’s start now and move every single read email from your inbox in an Archive folder. Do it now!

The problem with inbox 0 is that it doesn’t scale well. You simply can’t do it with 100 mails a day, 25 folders, multiple accounts. That’s why we need other rules.

2. One inbox to rule them all

Are you the guy with twelve different email inboxes? Seriously, what’s the matter? You are one and only one person. You should have one and only one inbox. So, starting now, redirect all your addresses into one inbox.

The obvious exception is your work email. It is fine to separate well work and private life. But if, sometimes, you doubt about which address to give to someone, it doesn’t mean that you have to create a third account. It means that you need to merge the existing ones.

3. No folders

That’s it. No exception. Some people will have a hard time with that rule but it is the most mandatory one. You should not even have a sent folder. You only need the inbox and the archives. When you need to look for a given email, use the built-in search mechanism. Most mail solutions, like GMail, offer very good tagging features. Tagging is also present in Thunderbird and can be improved with extensions. The advantages of tags is that you don’t have to tag an email to archive it. Or you can use multiple tags on the same email.

If you really insist on having folders, you will find yourself spending more time thinking about where to move a given email. And, when looking for that mail, you will have to go through ten potential recipient folders. Not to mention that you have to maintain your folder structure, to clean folder from finished projects, etc. Don’t do folders. Just don’t.

You will probably tell me that your folder structure is efficient. It is not. Take one month to try and you will see.

4. Don’t delete

Deleting is, in fact, just another folder called Trash. Skip this and archive everything. Most email solutions allow you to define an Archive folder. Just do that. Let me repeat it again : inbox and archives are all you need.

If your space is limited, first consider changing to a true email provider. Simplifying your life is more important than following stupid rules. If you nevertheless hit the limit, go through your archives folder and order email by size. Select and delete the biggest one. Space is always consumed by a tiny fraction of emails with very large attachment. Delete them when you have a warning about the space left on your account. If the attachment was important, it should be elsewhere on your hard disk anyway. Email is not a storage platform.

5. Handle conversations, not individual emails

A simple conversation about which restaurant to choose for the business lunch can contain tenth of emails. Forget about that and use the conversation mode. It’s the default in GMail and is becoming available for most provider. There’s a thunderbird extension too.

By handling conversations as a whole, you will have a feeling of less noise, less emails. Also, don’t mind archiving something because you know that, in case of a new reply, the whole conversation will be seen. As soon as you answered to a conversation and don’t have any action left, archive the whole conversation immediately.

6. Unsubscribe from everything you can

It is astonishing how quickly we are subscribed to an insane amount of newsletters or mailing-lists. Unsubscribe from everything. As soon as you receive an email that you were not explicitly expecting, unsubscribe. Even if it is interesting. If you need it, you will always be able to find it later on the web. Even the mailing list of your pet project is not relevant anymore: you can always read the mailing list archives on the web when you want to be informed. The major difference is that you are never annoyed when you don’t want it.

Do the same with bug trackers. Even if you find it interesting now, chances are that you will not be interested anymore in a couple of months. But you will still receive every single updates for years if you don’t unsubscribe. For very interesting things, make a bookmark or use a service like Pocket and visit regularly until your interest fade away.

The rule is quite simple : as soon as you receive an email that you archive immediately, you should unsubscribe from that sender.

If the information is really important, the world will let you know, don’t worry.

7. Disable every single mail notifications

Yes. Every single notification. In hundred percent of the case, the notification is redundant with a built-in notification in the website. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, they all have mail notifications enabled by default and it is very hard to disable them. Do it anyway. If you want to be informed, go to the website. If you forget to do it, it means that this website doesn’t matter anyway.

Your inbox is a way to communicate with people, not a spaceship dashboard invaded by robots trying to get your attention. Don’t worry, you will never miss something crucial.

8. Unsubscribe from that annoying contact

You probably have a few contacts that send irrelevant emails to all of their contacts every once in a while. Ask them politely to not send them to you. Don’t be aggressive, be polite and friendly. Say that you don’t want to receive them anymore, implying that it was fine until now. Be honest and say that, those days, you receive too much emails. It works better than you think and apply also to that colleague putting you in CC: of every single mail he’s sending.

9. Ignore conversations

Sometimes, you are in CC: of an email which becomes a huge conversation in which you have absolutely no interest. In GMail, there’s a very nice feature called “Mute this conversation”. Use it as soon as a conversation you are not interested in grows is more than three emails.

Don’t fear, just hit the button.

10. Teach your spam filter to do the work

When everything else fails, mark the unwanted email as Spam. Spam filters are learning. If you do that a few times with a given kind of emails, those will be marked automatically as spam in the future. All benefit to your inbox.

11. When you really have no choice

In a corporate environment where marking some emails as spam is not an option, there’s also the silver bullet: an automatic filter that immediately archive all emails where you are not in the To field. This one is very effective to remove the noise and the emails are still available in your archives.

Conclusion

Applying those rules strictly for one month led me to less than 10 emails per day on both my professional and personal inbox. Best, I didn’t add the need for rule 11 and used rule 10 only a couple of time.

Also, I took the habit to immediately answer from my smartphone instead of waiting to be on my laptop to write a more in depth answer. A quick answer of a few words is often more useful than waiting. In only one month, the inbox 0 came from an every day fight to a normal state. Of course, some emails wait a couple of day that I take the time to answer them but it is manageable. I divided the time spent in my mailbox by ten and my typical response time came down from one week to a couple of hours.

You have to keep in mind that, since the rise of spam, missing an email is something acceptable those day. By applying those rules, you will in fact miss less important mails. In the worst case, you still have the excuse of “It was in my spam folder”.

But I agree that this requires a modern mail solution. Doing a good an efficient work requires good tools. A good mail client is just like a good chair, a good screen and a good keyboard. If your company still want to stay with, His Noodly Appendage forbid, Lotus Notes (cough), they just can’t expect you to do any productive email work at all. You don’t build a modern bridge with a century old hammer.

Lettre ouverte aux chemins de fer belges

mercredi 2 janvier 2013 à 00:02

Vieux train tout rouillé

Chère Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Belges,

Le 22 décembre dernier, un internaute découvrait par hasard lors d’une recherche sur Google qu’une base de données contenant les informations de 1,4 millions de vos clients était publiée sur votre site web. Cette base de donnée, accessible depuis au moins un mois, était entièrement indexée par Google et Bing.

Je suis au nombre de ces clients. Certaines de mes informations personnelles privées sont donc devenues publiques par votre faute. Contrairement à d’autres, je ne m’en offusquerais pas outre mesure. En effet, l’erreur est humaine et, dans les années à venir, nous allons devoir apprendre à vivre avec des évènements de ce type de plus en plus nombreux.

Si l’erreur est humaine et acceptable, le déni et le mensonge ne le sont pas.

Votre devoir, en temps que responsable de ces données, était d’envoyer un email à toutes les personnes concernées en expliquant la situation et en détaillant, pour chacun, les informations concernées. Petit conseil : utilisez le champs copie cachée au lieu de copie simple. Je blague…

Loin de faire preuve de transparence et d’honnêteté, vous avez sciemment menti en prétendant que les données ne concernait qu’une petite quantité d’usagers. À demi-mot, vous laissiez également sous-entendre que l’internaute qui avait découvert l’affaire avait effectué des actions illégales. Ce qui est entièrement faux.

Un citoyen belge s’est ému de cet état de fait et a monté un site permettant à tout un chacun de vérifier si ses données étaient dans la liste. Ce service, c’est vous, la SNCB, qui auriez du le mettre en place. Un citoyen s’en est chargé de manière purement désintéressée. Remarquons que, dans un soucis d’éthique qui ne fut pas le votre, son site ne permet pas d’accéder aux données proprement dites. Il permet juste de vérifier si, oui ou non, vous êtes concerné. En temps que membre du Parti Pirate, parti politique dont les valeurs sont la transparence et le respect de la vie privée, j’accorderais volontiers à l’auteur de ce site une médaille de citoyenneté.

Apprenant cette initiative, votre première réaction a été de déclarer que vous étudiez les possibilités de poursuites légales à l’encontre de cette personne, sans même avoir pris la peine de la contacter.

Si telle est est bien votre intention, je vous saurais gré de bien vouloir d’abord attaquer les deux sites qui ont rendu ces données publiques : Google et Bing, ce dernier appartenant à Microsoft.

Quoiqu’il en soit, ces données sont publiques, prenons acte. Elles ont certainement déjà été vendues à des centaines de spammeurs et d’arnaqueurs en tout genre. Dans les semaines qui viennent, les hotlines d’Amazon et d’eBay vont être envahies d’appels de personnes ayant « oublié » leur mot de passe mais pouvant prouver leur identité avec leur adresse postale et leur numéro de téléphone.

En cas d’incendie, le premier réflexe est d’évacuer l’immeuble et d’appeler les pompiers, pas d’attaquer en justice la personne qui a crié « Au feu ! ».

Que votre service informatique aie fait une énorme boulette, je peux le concevoir. Que cette erreur soit restée non détectée pendant un mois, passe encore. Mais que votre direction fasse preuve d’une telle stupidité suffisante c’est une chose que je ne peux admettre. Cette direction qui défraie chaque année la chronique par l’ampleur des bonus que s’octroient les dirigeants.

Mais je crois que cette direction et moi faisons partie d’une autre génération, d’un autre monde. Dans 10 ans plus les retards, ballonnée de fierté, elle inaugurera en grande pompe la première rame de RER que je regarderai circuler à vide depuis les voitures autonomes partagées que je décrivais dans un article précédent.

En ces premières heures de l’année nouvelle, cette affaire aura au moins eu le mérite de m’ouvrir les yeux sur une triste réalité : malgré le travail quotidien de votre personnel, de l’accompagnateur à l’informaticien, vous êtes en train de devenir obsolète.

2013 sera l’année où vous saurez vous réinventer, vous adapter. Ou l’année où vous condamnerez vous-mêmes votre avenir et clouerez le premier clou de votre cercueil.

À vous de choisir et de nous le prouver par vos actions !

 

Photo par Sergio Ziliotti

The future of book publishing

samedi 29 décembre 2012 à 15:20

Ce texte est également disponible en Français. Also available on Medium.

The music industry illustrates well the failed transition between a physical and a virtual market. A perfect example of bad practices and pitfalls.

But don’t believe that it is an isolated case. The music industry has only been the first of many. With the rise of 3D printing and e-reader devices, the majority of the industry will, sooner or later, face virtualization.

Books

This virtualization come with a huge questioning and a return to fundamentals. Let’s take a simple example with the publishing industry.

An author who wrote a book wants three things:

  1. See his text corrected and improved.
  2. Reach the maximum number of readers.
  3. Receive the most money.

Different authors may have different priorities regarding those three items but they are always present. And, no surprise, these services are exactly what a traditional publisher offers to authors.

However, this service is very expensive. The author gets only a few percent of the selling price. There’s also an arbitrary line between the published authors and those who are not because the editor is not sure to make enough profit with the book. JK Rowling is famous for having suffered multiple rejections of her Harry Potter. How many Harry Potter rot on a hard drive because publishers are not aware of the public taste or because the authors did not have the stubbornness of Rowling?

But, once again, virtualization disrupt the game.

The author will publish his first story, chapter by chapter, on a site similar to Medium. This publication may be public or restricted to a small group of reviewers. Readers will have the opportunity to submit corrections or suggestions on a specific area of ​​the text. The author can accept or reject them in a single click.

Once satisfied, the author will set two prices for his text: the minimal publication price, for example € 0.10, and the minimal participation percentage, for example 50%.

A publisher wants to combine multiple texts in a book. Let say that there are 10 texts by 10 different authors, each having the same length and the same rate of € 0.10 / 50%.

Each author has participated in 10% of the book and want a minimum percentage of 50% of its stake. It means 5% of the price of the book with a minimum of € 0.10.

If the publisher decides to sell the book for € 1, there will therefore be not benefit. If he sells it € 2, he will make € 1. And if he sells € 10, he will make € 5 but each author will make € 0.50. Medium could also take a small percentage .

By setting a minimum price of € 0, an author can allow the text to be used in any free ebook but without sacrificing his revenues from paid ebooks.

By integrating solutions like EasyBook in Medium, the publication of a book will be fully automated. Epub file will be automatically generated and distributed through channels such as Google Play or Amazon and, in the case of free ebooks, through the appropriate OPDS.

The missing link to dead tree books can be fulfilled with services such as InLibroVeritas.

Unlike the previous steps, this service requires an initial investment. For any web user, the solution is obvious: crowdfunding. The whole process would be integrated in Medium, publisher’s benefit being shared with the funders. After all, if you liked the first chapter, why not invest a few bucks to become co-editor and become interested in the success of the book?

Needless to say, an author could be his own publisher and its own investor.

Plenty of cheap and available books, the possibility for everyone to publish his own book. A perfect future? I think so. But, for some reason, I’m not sure that all current editors share my enthusiasm.

Ce texte est également disponible en Français. Also available on Medium.
Picture by Abhi Sharma