I am fascinated by Arianna Huffington. This 5O years old woman was just a blogger and now she is one of the most influent media in New York City and a real competitor for the biggest newspapers!
Arianna Huffington (born Arianna Stassinopoulos on July 15, 1950 in Athens, Greece) is an author and nationally syndicated columnist in the United States.
Huffington describes herself as a “former right-winger who has evolved into a compassionate and progressive populist”. She is the founder of The Huffington Post, an online news and commentary website and aggregated blog. Her latest book is On Becoming Fearless…. in Love, Work, and Life.

The Huffington Post (often referred to on the Internet as HuffPo or HuffPost) is a politically liberal online news website and aggregated weblog. It was launched on May 9, 2005 as a news and commentary outlet. Its roster of bloggers includes many people from Arianna Huffington’s extensive network of prominent “friends.” As of August 8, 2006 it was the 5th most popular weblog overall as measured by web links and the most popular “Analysis and Opinion” web site as measured by web hits.

In August 2006, it was announced that Softbank Capital would invest $5 million in the online news site, which has grown dramatically popular in only a year, to help expand it. Plans include hiring more staff to update the site 24 hours a day, hiring in-house reporters, and a multimedia team to do video reports. Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners also invested. The news marks the site’s first “first round of venture capital funding.”
The site now has invested in Vlogging, or video blogging, with many of the site contributors contributing via video, and capturing clips in the media and posting them on the site.

A very interesting concept being created is called “We are smarter than me”
“Over a million students, faculty and alumni of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as leaders, authors, and experts from the fields of management and technology were invited to contribute in a wiki-based community that coalesced at wearesmarter.org. Members were asked to develop and share their insights about why community approaches work or don’t work when it comes to marketing, business development, distribution, and more, and what companies have to do to make them work better.

The goal of the project was to develop a book that addresses what other best-selling books on community have not. Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds have identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds.” (cf wearesmarter.org)

What we can discuss is the efficiency question. Of course, a collectiv and collaborativ writing must be faster in terms of quantity and ideas but is it really efficient? To my mind, a book must be a synthesis of a thought and not an addition of many.
The collaboration is fantastic but need to be “controlled” by super-readers to make it coherent, usefull and affordable in terms of content. Have a look at wikipedia: there is a team of moderators who help keep it corrrect, as much as they can.
Anyway it is a very good experience and a very nice way to do things and improve the diversity and the quality of a book.

China’s state employs 30,000 people to investigate on the net and to save trafic from “uncorrect content” as they say.
I am personally shocked by this frightening and non democratic process. Even if we cannot link China’s control to the Finnish student case, I do not think it is possible to control the trafic and furthermore to prevent crimes…

If you have seen the movie Minority Report, with Tom Cruise, with its pre-crime unit, we can see -even if it’s a fiction- what could be the consequences of a preventiv-police, in terms of ethics and values.

Facebook is now the most expensive website in the world: 15 billion dollars!!!
Microsoft, which has not find its strategy on the web yet could not let Facebook become another Google’s property!! Microsoft had to be a part of it!!
But they paid the price: 240 million dollars for only 1.6% of the site.
As you know, Facebook is a website first dedicated to students from university. It allowed them to get connected with their friends and to create a selected community. The concept is not very far away from myspace, but it is definetly a “high level” myspace, not dedicated to music and so on but mainly to the network.
Facebook is nothing without its users. The site, as many Web 2.0 sites, provides no content itself, but the information given by the members are an amazing amount of potential money for the advertisers, and companies. Indeed, the formula: “tell me who you know, I will tell you who you are” shows the site is a key issue to advertisers always in need of contacts, and furthermore, in need of a precise description of their targets. In fact, we all describe what we do on facebook, we tell our age, our education, our job… a lot of information that can be used for business reasons.

The question of Google is very interesting because, to my mind, it is the problem that we meet when we are confronted to a quasi-monopoly situation. I was totally a pro google before. Indeed, it offers amazing possibilities: great and best searches on the web and a fantastic software to make you discover the world (Google earth), a good webmail (Gmail)… and all of it for free!

Yet, Google has now become a huge company. Its stock-valuation is bigger than General Motors!! (more than 130 billion dollars). Google controls a lot of other websites and services on the web. (You tube…) Its sponsored-links system is present everywhere.

Furthermore, Google keeps every search that had been done on its website and we don’t really know what they do with this huge amount of information. Google has also a lot of information on its users and can sell it to advertisers or other companies… To my mind, this darkness concerning private information and Google’s control on the net is very obscur and can be a little bit frightenning…

I am very worried to see the internet become a “linear” way of communication -which means 1 transmitter and 1 receiver-, controlled by companies and so on…

I am probably very naive but I like to think that the internet is something else than a business.

Even if I am not an idealist or an anti-capitalist and I think I do understand the stakes and the globalisation realities, I don’t think Internet-empires are the good way to improve creativity and communication in a generous way.

Of course, we all heard a lot about sustainable developpement theories.
Yes, it seems obvious that we are all concerned by environmental issues even companies, nowadays. But they won’t imagine to decrease!!
Sustainable developpement is a concept based on three main values, as we can see here:

Currently, I am working in a firm that has 65 employees. It is based in Paris, on the street called Rue Maubert, in the 15th arrondisement. Its business is to sell children’s software.
It gets a federal subsidy to hire interns. That is why I got this job of sales representative. At first, my function was that of junior marketing manager, but I changed.

We sell a wide range of products branded by Youngsoft. We have many expenses to afford regarding marketing. Our display advertising in the metro is one of the most expensive. Our human ressources department also costs a lot of money. We create our own ads thanks to our writing staff, and we create the user’s guides, as well.

Our results for the three first months of this year have all been very good. Our market has a great potential right now, and that is why we are making huge profits.
We’d like to sell our products in Tahiti because we think overseas customers  would be interested in buying them.
To sum up, thanks to our ethics and thanks to our interesting specialized field, we should have a successful future.

I sent a letter to the UN last year to force them to act for the populations who still have to stay in the Tchernobyl area because they had no money to live somewhere else.
Unicef is working on the issue but it is not enough.

</