agoora ... smalltalk << Internet

Long time no see ...

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:18:00 +0200

Well, after a long period of silence, some news, i'm now having fun with gwt and flex on a very cool proof of concept ... so i'm quite busy for the moment... AGAIN.
And i have tons of work to do on playscope.com, and other websites too. Playscope v3 website should be released in a few weeks now (it's still old but better than the current one, i started to code this new version last year, then i became busy working on loveticket.com.

So, i went on the internet tonight to see the latests news, and i felt really surprized about microsoft latest takeover (powerset.com [hi steve] ), powerset was named "the google killer" 2 years ago and finally has been released late this year. For the technology, powerset is a great choice for microsoft (even better than yahoo), microsoft is starting to have a lot of weapons to fight with google now (fast, powerset, ...)

Well, maybe the killer search engine will be cuill !

I'm also testing lively tonight, it seems to be very attractive and cool, you can have a look at my room there :

Painting exhibition of contemporary artist Aysun

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:45:00 +0200

Everything is ready !, we're proud but tired :-), come to discover Aysun new paintings !, this is the first contemporary art exhibition (GMAC) in front of La Defense, Paris, France

Varnishing-day : April 8 (5 to 7PM)
Start Time : Tuesday, April 8, 2008 at 9:20am
End Time : Saturday, April 12, 2008 at 10:20pm
Location : La défense - GMAC
City/Town : Paris, France

Website - Online gallery

Sarkozy clama por la liberación de Ingrid Betancourt

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 23:49:00 +0200

Please watch French President message and share on the Internet

Busy for the moment

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:39:00 +0100

Well, i'm pretty busy for the moment. Currently working on the next release of playscope.com video games websites (and currently migrating the CMS from my old version).

Also starting up thinking about new commercial website (3/4 months of development). Then, actually working on GWT and thinking about a technological move for my private developments (php -> java or ruby), i still dunno what to use for the moment (lack of time suxx) ...

And at last one good news, i recently joined the openId community (and they seem to be very cool ppl (hi bill ! ). I'll implement the openId and openSocial principles in my next commercial website.

three new projects to do this year

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:19:00 +0100

- Create my social network website (i own a quite good domain name for that)

- Create an accessible CMS (and a websites easy builder)

- Develop my brand online

2008 predictions

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:20:00 +0100

This are my predictions for 2008 (btw nothing really special) :

1. The Iphone will blast all the existing phone companies and GPS systems too and it will redefine the use of the day to day internet.

2. googlers will loose a lot of key members (departures)

3. Dedicated social networks will grow up (for healthcare, for patients, for cars lovers, movies and tv shows lovers, ...)

4. Semantic search technology (powerset.com) will be beaten by human social search engines (mahalo.com) for the same reasons as today, mahalo answers with better results than a standard search engine (google, live, yahoo, ask)

5. 3d shopping websites will rise up (potoroze.com (hi sebastien )

6. Year for personal videoblogging and quality video contents (hulu, new players and professional-driven models)

7. Turnover will start again in many companies due to the "Internet rebirth"

8. RIA and accessibility will be good friends

9. Our personalized giftcards websites like loveticket.com will grow up

10. Facebook will lead the advertizing industry and become the #1 website worldwide

Too much social networks kills Networking !

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:05:00 +0100

Well, i have been using some networks since 2 years now. And the number of available networks is increasing too fast (viadeo, linkedin, xing (openbc, hi yann ;)), ryze, facebook, twitter, pownce, digg, del.icio.us, mahalo, seesmic (hi loic ;)), youtube (hi skal ;)), joost, dailymotion (hi nathan, sony, yann, stephane, carlos ;)), myspace, emurse, plaxo pulse, ziki, hulu, google reader, ...),

I'm a regular user of linkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, mahalo and expecting good things in 2008 on Joost and seesmic. it's time for a common api for all of them, it's so boring to build a new network on any new website or to invite/import the same people everywhere. When will this stop ? it's now time for the opensocial api with the granular privacy control like on facebook.

Please google make this dream come true in 2008 ! Happy new year.

Why should i redesign a content management system ?

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:10:00 +0100

I have been working on content management for more than a decade, and i wrote my first content management system in 2002 (used by my current employer and also by some websites (playscope.com, aysun.org, loveticket.com, parismontmartre.org, ...). Features like tags, classification, related documents, search engine, themes, rich editor, taxonomy, collaborative filtering, peronalization, users management, communities, rich media, marketing rules, content ordering are currently available on it.

But the question i'm asking myself now is : is it worth doing to redesign a content management system nowadays ? I like to code, but i have to rebuild all from scratch now, and to introduce web services on it, i have all the ideas on how and what to do, but it's quite difficult to build this alone and after work. Well, I should do it and firstly work on the webservices (and new technologies of course : openId, rpc, wcag-aa, gwt .. ), i hope 2008 will be my rebirth on the Internet (more post to come with samples screens from my cms soon).

why i like twitter and why i like to follow thought leaders on it ?

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 00:05:00 +0100

I really like twitter.com, it's a really nice online tool, and this days, i started to follow some people on the internet, and i understand why this tool is so great : i'm now able to follow a lot of internet key opinion leaders, and that's really cool. Because, they're almost early adopters of every technology, of every new thing on the internet, twitter helps me so much to discover great new things on the internet.

Twitter website

why i like the iphone ?

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 00:05:00 +0100

Every decade, the technologies have a revolution, in my short life, i had the chance to grow up when the current revolution was the deployment of the internet in France in 1995/1996. It was so exciting and i have learned and created so much things and met many cool, sawwy and interesting people. That was so great ! : bringing internet in everybody's life, that was an incredible experience and the best thing to work on.

Then 2001 comes, and everything goes down... At this time, some of my friends were fired, they started to travel around the globe and some others started to work on the cellphones technologies, but honestly it was really not exciting (doing ringtones and wap/imode services was not a difficult work), and the voice/video/internet convergence was really not a subject, so i decided to move in another way and to work for a large company on web content management and personalization but i was in my bubble and really far from my passion : the Internet.

Last month, Apple Iphone has been released in France, and i have never wanted a thing like this since 12 years (Working on the internet and help bringing the technology in everybody's house). The iphone will change our lives and change the way everybody's using the internet. There are many new usages possible now with this tool, and it'll be so cool to follow and to take part of this. Now, i can use internet everywhere, without any rule, without any firewall, without any limits. Apple did it : the technologies convergence with the iphone is real. Next year, everybody will use the internet everywhere, without any limit. This will change all the industry. This is why the iPhone is to be a major breakthru in the internet industry.

The revolution has just begun. This decade will be really interesting, a techology big bang is coming.

Apple website

what's wrong with Ajax and accessibility ?

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 23:21:00 +0100

This year, i have spent many time on that subject. Most of my collegues thought that Javascript is a huge problem for accessibility. But i don't think so and i'd like to demonstrate why.

According to me, the main problem on that topic is : people are always taking this problem in the wrong side. Improving usability of web based applications is a real solution to help deficient people.

Web2.0 applications are great, and usability of web2 applications can help deficient people. The tools are not really ready for that now.

This is why, with some of my coworkers and also with a blind collegue, we are working to build a quite cool webmasters application where usability is there, and where deficient persons are able to use it. I beleive that computers, innovation and upcoming technologies are a real solution for helping this community. To build this solution, we have choosen the GWT framework, and we've improved the rendering of the javascripts web components to make them compatible with accessibility guidelines, we had to use a Javascript hack to make the application accessible.

Here there's some basic rules to follow to build an accessible web2 application :

- Design your application first, then ask an accessibility expert to see the limits.
- Define your webservices (i mean the exchange protocol between your services and your ajax client)..
- Use standard frameworks for the server side..
- Use GWT on the client side (i"ll explain this later, but the most important thing is : your client must be a 100% javascript application for this to work)..

More to come soon on that topic. (please be patient, i'm a blog newbie ;-))

Why i like mahalo ?

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, i was at Leweb3 conference in Paris, and one of the best moment i had was Mr Jason Calacanis / Mahalo presentation. I loved the way he defend the Internet with so much Passion and he's absolutely right, internet is being polluted and this is killing the community. Two years ago, i was about to create a search engine on that subject, something between del.icio.us / experts exchange - social network and google, but i had no time to move forward alone.

My initial concept was : nowadays, it's becoming difficult to find relevant contents on the internet, because many players started doing SEO on search engines, and companies started to monetize keywords on search results. That's, on my purpose, part of the internet pollution. I really thought that the solution was to build a different search engine based on both human and computers ranking algorithms. The aim of this project was to provide relevant contents first (i started to think about a mix between computer rankings and human votes while using linkedin answers, every question i have asked was answered very quickly and with a relevant answer all the time).

I thought the ratio between computers rankings algorithms and human rankings would be 40% / 60%, with some special features :

- Each rating made on the websites has to be reviewed by peers

- Each website in the index has to be found in the 2 first results pages of each major search engine (ask, google, yahoo, live)

- NO ADS, every user is able to make a donation each year to the community to stop that kind of lame business.

- The search engine is opened free, but if you wanna contribute, you had to be invited by a friend only. And your friend is responsible of your voice too (if you're doing bad things, he'll also pay (user level downgrading and rating downgrading))

Then, i stopped my project when somebody told me that Jason has done Mahalo and he answered many of my ideas with his ecosystem. Mahalo is great, go and test it as you like (http://www.mahalo.com/) this is part of the future of the free internet.

More than words now, just watch Jason conference there :

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation - Part 1

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation - Part 2

Jason Calacanis 2007 LeWeb3 Presentation - Q&A

Thank you Mister Calacanis.