la stratégie online de obama en moins de 100 mots (!), le finish de galactica, facebook open source, etc.

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May 27, 2008, 3:17:52 AM5/27/08
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Where Does Facebook Grow From Here



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Facebook publishes demographic data through its advertising platform. Potential advertisers can obtain estimates for the number of Facebook users by age group, gender, education, country, and even relationship status! While the estimates most likely rely on user supplied data, they provide the best publicly available numbers on the Facebook user base.



Facebook currently has about 75M users spread across more than 80 countries. The good news is that the top three countries (US,UK,Canada) now account for only about 61% of all users:

pathint

A few large (as in population) countries immediately jump out including Turkey, Columbia, and France. Facebook is the top social network in these countries yet the number of Facebook users is small relative to the population. The challenge is that there are more countries on the list where Facebook is up against other more widely used social networks.



According to Alexa, Facebook overtook Myspace as the #1 social networking site on the web. Worldwide numbers are interesting but everyone knows that social networks are best compared on a regional basis. Compare Alexa's recent numbers to the map of regional Social Network Market Share that Tim posted about a month ago. Regional market leaders (Friendster in Southeast Asia, Hi5/Orkut in South Asia and Latin America, Bebo/LiveJournal in parts of Europe) have significant numbers of users and dislodging each of them won't be easy.



What to do in countries with strong incumbent social networks? Incumbency relies on average users aversion to recreating "friendships" and profiles.The ideal come-from-behind strategy is to embrace Data Portability. Or more precisely, as Tim stated last November:

Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That's what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform.

The "our walled garden is better than their walled garden" blueprint works best when you are already one of the established market leaders. The same Data Portability strategy that makes sense for an upstart could be what defines the dominant global social networking platform. Facebook's tussle with Google over Friend Connect shows that they are struggling with this issue. (Also see David Recordon's recent post on Myspace as well.)



Actually, the more probable scenario is that (closed) social networks become less important over the long term. With more web applications incorporating social web features, users will gradually "leave" closed social networks altogether. Already, I know less and less people who use Facebook regularly. Most people I know log in only when they receive a "friend" request - sadly hugs, gifts, zombies and pokes are losing their allure.



One other demographic tidbit. Just like the US, the Facebook overseas user base is young, with most users less than 34 years old. Given its roots as a US college social network, Facebook has more college-age (18-25) users in the US:

pathint





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Voir en ligne : Where Does Facebook Grow From Here

Delicious Library 2.0 is now shipping



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Filed under: Software

The beta period is over and Delicious Library 2.0 is officially ready to go (we took an early look at version 2 back in March). If you're unfamiliar, Delicious Library is the beautiful personal media database (that's the fancy way of saying "it keeps track of your stuff") that's as fun as it is useful. Use your Mac's iSight camera to scan the UPC on a book, DVD, software, games, etc. and watch it appear on your "shelf." From there, you can track who you've loaned it to, publish your library to the web and a whole lot more.

Version 2.0 includes more than 100 changes, including


  • One-click web publishing

  • Speedier graphics

  • iTunes integration

  • Three-click selling


There's plenty more, of course, and you can read the rest here. Delicious Library 2.0 requires Mac OS 10.5 and a single license will cost you $40US.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments




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Voir en ligne : Delicious Library 2.0 is now shipping

Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform



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Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.


Bebo already licenses the Facebook Platform, which allows third parties to make their Facebook applications work on Bebo, too. With the new announcement, social networks won’t need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook. They’ll simply map their existing APIs to Facebook Platform (which isn’t trivial) and go. Expect to see the four major technical pieces of Facebook Platform - FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API to be open sourced and made available to anyone.


If they mirror the Open Social approach, third parties will be free to change the Facebook Platform components for their own use and deploy them on their own sites. To have those changes be incorporated into the official versions of Facebook Platform, however, would require Facebook’s approval.


This is a nearly inevitable response to Open Social, which is backed by Google, MySpace and Yahoo. Open Social is also an open source platform, run the the Open Social Foundation. Facebook has been looking more and more like a walled garden of late, and they are being regularly out maneuvered by competitors. Time to fight back.


Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.





"

Voir en ligne : Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform

Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore Talks Football, Religion, and What He’s Up to Next



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When Ron Moore was a young writer in the 1990s cranking out the familiar rhythms of Star Trek shows—from Next Generation to Deep Space Nine and Voyager — he chafed at the strictures of TV sci-fi. (The pseudoscience was "awful to write and soul-sapping," Moore says.) So when he got the chance to remake the 1970s cheesefest Battlestar Galactica for the Sci-Fi 
Channel in 2003, he tossed those clichés out the airlock. Now Moore's version, a tightly constructed drama with cliff-hangers and the occasional exciting space dogfight, is in its final season. In his Universal Studios office, Moore spoke to Wired about making dark, naturalistic science fiction.



Wired: What was your concept for remaking Battlestar Galactica?



Moore: I wanted something that was neither Star Wars-Star Trek, which I saw as the romantic side, nor Blade Runner-Matrix, the cyberpunk side. I thought there had to be a third category. To a large extent, I'd say, yeah, we accomplished that.



Wired: Then you tucked in all that moral ambiguity.



Moore: One of the things I like about our version is that the Galactica isn't one of the best ships in the fleet. If you tell stories about the elite, they have to be paragons. We said the ship was going into retirement and the crew were all castoffs and knuckleheads. To me that's an interesting show.



Wired: And Adama is a very different patriarch than Captain Picard.



Moore: They respect him and they all have affection for him, but not everybody thinks he walks on water. And as you get further into the show, you can see that he's a deeply flawed man — as all fathers are. As we all are.



Wired: Did you feel any responsibility to fans to not change too much?



Moore: I felt a responsibility to make it Battlestar Galactica, but by my lights. I tried to maintain a lot of the superstructure. But the original writers had a great premise for a series that just couldn't be executed on ABC in 1978. They had to make it cheesy fun. I showed it to my 9-year-old son, and he loves it. As a kid's show, it works.



But look, the story opens with a genocide, an apocalyptic destruction of 12 planets. Billions of human lives are lost. The survivors run away, fleeing an implacable enemy, the Cylons, who are determined to destroy them, and they're looking for a mythical place called Earth.



And the first place they go is the casino planet.



Wired: A lot of those '70s and '80s shows had grim backstories. Even Knight Rider.



Moore: Yeah, you can strip something down to these dark premises and wonder if audiences are going to follow you there. The network did a test of our miniseries just before it went on the air, and it was one of the worst-rated ever. The company that did it sent back this report that just said, "Nobody likes these characters, we see no reason this should ever become a series, it's too dark, it's too scary." Fortunately, it was also too late. The show was done — locked, in the can. It went to air with this sense of fatalism on the part of the network. Then they were shocked when the numbers were so good.



Wired: Since then, have you written yourselves into any corners?



Moore: Some of that is happening right now as we wrap up the show. It's like, OK, what did that mean, exactly? How do we get out of this?



Wired: Were you a geek as a kid?



Moore: I grew up in Chowchilla, California, which was about 4,500 people — small enough where I could be in the marching band and be the quarterback of the football team. I could love Star Trek and still be accepted as one of the jocks. So it was sort of surprising to me when I left and people were like, "You're a Star Trek fan? Oh my god, you're such a nerd." I'm like, "But I was the quarterback!"



Wired: The lesson is, always lead with the football thing.



Moore: Yeah, but I just didn't grow up with the inferiority complex that seems to go with everyone else's experiences of loving this material.



Wired: There's a lot of religion on the show. Are you religious?



Moore: I'm a recovering Catholic. At one point I looked into various Eastern religions, and now I've settled into a sort of agnosticism. But I always felt it was something noticeably missing from the Star Trek universe.



You can deal with religion more aggressively in science fiction than you can in a contemporary show. You get a pass because everyone agrees it's not Christianity or Islam or any of those things we're so freaked out about. Even though it is.



Wired: What's going on with Caprica, the Galactica spinoff-prequel?



Moore: It's busy. We're in prep, and we have a director. The script has been written for two years, so there's not a lot of heavy lifting on the page.



Wired: Then what?



Moore: I have another pilot called Virtuality that [BSG co-executive producer] Mike Taylor and I wrote, which has been ordered by Fox. We don't know where it's going to be made, but it'll probably start shooting in July. That's a two-hour movie, and we'll see when and if they make it a series.



Wired: You just directed an episode. What was that like?



Moore: Tremendous. Usually when you're working on a script, you play the movie in your head as you write it. And one of the first things you have to lose in this business is that movie, because it's never going to be that way. You're handing your words over to other people, and they interpret them in their own ways. But when you're directing, you can actually make that movie. My son sat next to me for four days on the set and just lived in it, loved it. I could see the show through his eyes, and it was precious.



Senior editor Adam Rogers (adam_...@wired.com) wrote about Cirque du Soleil in issue 15.06.






"

Voir en ligne : Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore Talks Football, Religion, and What He's Up to Next

The Business of XKCD



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XKCD is a web comic created by 23-year-old physics major and programmer Randall Munroe who is actually making a living off his web-comic. Here’s a sample comic that I found particularly funny… but you have to be a programmer to appreciate it:



The New York Times just did a profile on Mr. Munroe and revealed some interesting stats with regard to making a living as a web comic-strip writer.


XKCD.com attracts 500,000 unique visitors a day and delivers over 80 million page views in a month. There are no ads, however. Instead, Munroe appears to make a living off T-shirt sales. They reportedly sell “thousands” of T-shirts a month, which supports him and his partner “reasonably well.” It’s apparently not that easy to find this success since Munroe estimates he’s one of only two dozen web comic authors who actually make a living off of their comics.


If we wildly guess at $10 profit per T-shirt, that gives us a range of $20,000-$99,000 (2000-9999 T-shirts) revenue a month which projects out to $240,000 to $1,188,000 a year in revenue. So, the duo probably pull in the mid-hundreds-of-thousands a year. Not bad at all, and a surprising revenue stream. In some ways it makes sense, in that advertising revenue for comics can’t be very lucrative. Regardless, it’s refreshing to see someone have a non-advertising revenue stream.


Another interesting tidbit from the article is that Munroe talks about the power of the Internet with respect to niche markets:


On the Internet, he said, “You can draw something that appeals to 1 percent of the audience — 1 percent of United States, that is three million people, that is more readers than small cartoons can have.”


He’s built a business succeeding in his niche market, despite the fact that “mass appeal” of a technical comic strip is relatively small.


It would seem a physically bound book would be an obvious step to take, and it appears its in the works in some form.

"

Voir en ligne : The Business of XKCD

Results : Data Portability’s Future



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A couple of weeks ago we ran an interactive game on the topic of Data Portability. We had a great response, with 680 people playing the game.



Here now are the results, showing how RWW readers think 5 of the major players - Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, and the non-profit Data Portability Project - will play out the future of Data Portability.



To remind you of the background to the game. Recently three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that. With all of these competing APIs, how this will play out is anyone's guess. So we created an interactive app from Impact Games that lets you model how each of the major players will impact the data portability movement, as well as share your opinions about what they should do.



The Results









A reminder that the 'opinion' category is what you hope will happen and 'prediction' is what you think will happen.



Two points were consistent with our expectations:




  • The majority hoped Facebook will merge, yet predicted that they won't.

  • The majority hoped Microsoft will advocate open standards, yet most expected them to launch a competing platform.



One result that surprised us was that many people didn't expect the Data Portability Project to endorse a specific platform. Given their roadmap, this would not have been our guess.



For more on the topic of the future of Data Portability, see Chris Messina's post today on the battle for the future of the social web and Dave McClure's response.



What do you think of the results? Do you think Facebook and Microsoft will listen to what early adopters think they should do?







"

Voir en ligne : Results: Data Portability's Future

Viacom "threatens" freedom of expression, says Google [Copyfight]



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Google's lawyers suggest that Viacom's strategy in its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube is to subvert the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's protection of websites and Internet service providers and "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression." The argument is set forth in a response to Viacom's amended complaint filed in April, which cited 150,000 examples of infringing content, which together had been viewed 1.5 billion times.








Google's response said that the company goes above and beyond to help rightsholders police the site, to answer Viacom's allegation that the company does "little or nothing." "To the contrary, the availability on the YouTube site of a vast library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the cornerstone of defendants' business plan," argued the Viacom counsel. Google's response also demands a trial by jury, moving further away from any possibility for a settlement.











"

Voir en ligne : Viacom "threatens" freedom of expression, says Google [Copyfight]

A Softer World : 310

The New York Times is launching an API



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Read Write Web (RWW) is reporting that the New York Times will release an API later this year. Their coverage is partially based on a post at Media Bistro earlier this week.


The New York Times, of course, is nearly the paper of record in the United States - with one of the highest circulations of any newspaper in the world. They’ve also led the way digitally for newspapers - doing their best to embrace the self-destructiveness that comes with putting a newspaper’s content on the web.

"

Voir en ligne : The New York Times is launching an API

Obama, Clinton’s record campaign finances overwhelm Excel



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A quick Memorial Day technology-politics hit, care of Politico's Kenneth Vogel, who describes how this year's record-setting Democratic campaign fundraising has caused some unexpected problems:

A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3.

Those programs can't download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.

Obama's January fundraising report, detailing the $23 million he raised and $41 million he spent in the last three months of 2007, far exceeded 65,536 rows listing contributions, refunds, expenditures, debts, reimbursements and other details. It was the first report to confound basic database programs since 2001, when the Federal Election Commission began directly posting candidates' fundraising reports online in an effort to make political money more accessible and transparent to voters.

By March, the reports filed by Clinton, a New York senator who attributes Obama's victories in several states to her own lack of money, also could no longer be downloaded into spreadsheets using basic applications.

If you want to comb through Obama or Clinton's cash, you either need to divide and import their reports section-by-section (a time-consuming and mind-numbing process) or purchase a more powerful database application, such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft Excel 2007, both of which retail for $229.

A few paragraphs down, Vogel adds this bit: "In a revealing insight into the significant fundraising disparity between the two Democrats and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, it is still possible to download his reports with plain-old Excel."

"

Voir en ligne : Obama, Clinton's record campaign finances overwhelm Excel

The success of the startup Obama, the 100-word version [Politics]



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Barack Obama's campaign for president has raised a staggering $200 million from contributors through the Web, tapping Valley talent like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Mark Gorenberg, a VC with Hummer Winblad. Obama has surpassed fundraising efforts by his primary opponent Hillary Clinton, even though she's raised more money for her campaign than her husband, former President Bill Clinton, ever did in winning an election. And he's doing it under the rules put in place by the Republican candidate, John McCain, under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. You can read all the details in The Atlantic's 5,243-word feature by Joshua Green, but a summary, 98-word paragraph is all you need to read.








"If the typical Gore event was 20 people in a living room writing six-figure checks, and the Kerry event was 2,000 people in a hotel ballroom writing four-figure checks, this year for Obama we have stadium rallies of 20,000 people who pay absolutely nothing, and then go home and contribute a few dollars online." Obama himself shrewdly capitalizes on both the turnout and the connectivity of his stadium crowds by routinely asking them to hold up their cell phones and punch in a five-digit number to text their contact information to the campaign.

That's right, text short codes. Because armed with a phone number, the campaign instantly knows nearly everything they'd need to reach out to potential supporters to solicit donations as well as remind them to vote in primaries and, eventually, the general election — from voter registration status to address, contribution history to demographic data. Obama isn't the social network candidate, he's the American Idol candidate.(Photo from Steve Jurvetson)









"

Voir en ligne : The success of the startup Obama, the 100-word version [Politics]

mapping the human ‘diseasome’



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diseasome.jpg

the NYTimes seems to churn out high-quality data visualizations faster than I can blog them.



a network visualization linking different diseases, represented by circles, to the genes they have in common, represented by squares. each circle represents a disease or disorder & is scaled to the number of genes associated to that disease.



this map improves the understanding of the causes of disease & of the functions of particular genes. for instance, two genes have recently been found to influence the risk of both diabetes & prostate cancer.



[link: nytimes.com & nytimes.com (original article)]



see also:

. curehunter

. epidemiological map

"

Voir en ligne : mapping the human ‘diseasome’

Reddit Gets a Re-Design : More Shiny and Useful, Still Fast and Simple



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Social news site Reddit is launching a re-design this afternoon – its first major UI change since debuting back in 2005 and being acquired by Wired Digital in late 2006. The upgrade is mostly about usability and making features Reddit has always had much more obvious, and to that extent, they’ve done a great job.


Here’s what’s immediately noticeable on the new Reddit:



The top navigation bar has been re-styled, and now includes a link to the site’s “most controversial” stories (stories with both a lot of up and down votes).


On the right, you can now customize Reddit based on the topics you want aggregated on your homepage. Just check and un-check the categories you want included/removed.


Links for creating your own Reddit and submitting a link to the site are much more obvious (also on the right sidebar)


Story links have been re-styled – it’s not a dramatic change, but it’s easier on the eyes and includes links to comments, saving, hiding, and reporting.


While I’ve long thought Reddit often offers a more appealing story selection than Digg, its interface has long been so Spartan that it hurts (my eyes!). The new look definitely makes the site easier to navigate, read, and customize, without losing the simplicity that Reddit old-timers appreciate.


Like any overhaul, I’m sure some users will scream bloody murder, and some may be concerned that a more mainstream look and feel could lead to an influx of users from other social news sites that in turn pollute it with content that Reddit’s base finds uninteresting. But Reddit’s now prominent customization options should let users filter out the content they don’t want and keep its core users happy.


Reddit clearly didn’t rush this re-design, and it’s a nice balance of adding mainstream appeal while better highlighting its strengths. A job well done by the Reddit team.


Here’s a look at the old and new:




---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Reddit Hacked, Fixed
Reddit in Spanish, and More.
Reddit Media - More Proof that Digg Needs a Picture Section
Reddit River - A Lighter Version of Reddit for Mobiles
Reddit Elevates Custom Reddits; L33t Crowd 3lat3d
Slate Reddit Released
Slashdottit: Slashdot Clones Digg







"

Voir en ligne : Reddit Gets a Re-Design: More Shiny and Useful, Still Fast and Simple

Novell’s big opportunity



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A friend called me on Friday to ask what I thought about Novell. "Does it have a chance?" he asked?



The answer is increasingly, "Yes."



I never would have thought I'd be saying that, but whatever the cause of Novell's resurgence, it feels like the company is making a serious comeback. I've seen it with my own company, where an increasing number of our customers are requesting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).



Yes, it has yet to displace its competition: Ubuntu has more momentum but still lacks a winning revenue model that may hamper its transition from community standard to enterprise standard, while Red Hat continues to barrel forward yet doesn't feel as invincible as before.



But Novell's progress in its Linux business is nothing to sneeze at, with 65 percent growth in its last quarter. That progress is a direct result of its interoperability agreement with Microsoft, a relationship it has been extending of late.



I've harshly criticized this agreement because of the patent cloud it has placed over Linux, but after talking with a range of Novell SUSE/Microsoft customers about it, I'm increasingly convinced that the only company that is sold on the important of patent protection in the deal is Microsoft. As one recent customer noted to me, "The patent coverage for SUSE had exactly zero relevance to us in making our decision to go with SUSE."



Customers may be indifferent to the patent pact, but Novell's alignment with Microsoft has been very good so far for its business. Were that the only thing it was doing, however, it might not be much to cheer. Novell has been very busy on a range of different fronts:


..."

Voir en ligne : Novell's big opportunity

New "Andromeda" Strains Credulity [Andromeda Strain Review]



"


I had high hopes for the new Andromeda Strain miniseries, which airs tonight and tomorrow night on A&E. After all, the trailers looked pretty jazzy, and it was produced by both Ridley and Tony Scott — so there was double Scott power. And there were some great alien-virus-attack moments, along with some nice bits of scientific detective work that stayed pretty true to the book. Unfortunately, overall, the new version of Strain left me saying, "Wow, it's like a Sci Fi Channel original movie, only with an A-list cast." Spoilers ahead.








A&E's version of Andromeda flails around like a coked-up otter, especially in the first half hour or so. There's a satellite! And it crashes! And two pesky teens take it into a small town, where everyone dies horribly, much like you'd expect — and then, with no warning, we're suddenly lurched into trying to humanize the series' entire cast, in perfunctory, throwaway scenes.


Benjamin Bratt from Law And Order has a crazy ex and a teenage son with a moped. He wants moped boy to go stay with his sister. What will happen to moped boy? And some guy is a right-wing jerk, but it's okay because we later find out he's gay. But Will from Will And Grace is not gay, but is a hard-driving reporter with a substance abuse problem. Moped Boy is angry! We also meet the president of the United States, who drawls about how you have to throw the dice when you're hunting possum, because otherwise you'll be holding 'em when you want to be folding 'em. And Benjamin Bratt is secretly in love with one of his fellow epidemiologists, but Moped Boy thinks Benjamin Bratt is a know-it-all.


Actually, we see a lot of Moped Boy in the first half hour of the first episode, but then he's pretty much never seen again. He's symptomatic of the show's problem, which is that it has a humongous cast of characters — way more than the original novel or Robert Wise movie — and they're all completely one-dimensional, except for the movie's lurching stabs at making them compelling. By the time we get back to the virus killing everybody, we've sort of lost the thread thinking about Moped Boy and his failure to realize that Benjamin Bratt really does know everything. I had started to think Moped Boy was a major character, and wondered where he had gone.


So yeah, the new series follows the book and the movie — to some extent. There's an alien virus on that thar crashed satellite, and it's nothing like anything we've seen before. And it causes people to die instantly from blood clotting, or else (in a handful of cases) to go berzerk. And our five scientists go into a super-fancy underground bunker to figure out how to stop it.


andromedastrain-03.jpgBut the new version has to get fancy, throwing in every bit of new tech you can think of — the virus comes down wrapped in a nanotech shield of "Bucky Balls" — and the super-mutating virus is like "stem cells" because it can transform itself and adapt to anything. And there's a whole complicated backstory about how the virus came from a wormhole — and maybe it came from the future! — because the army has a secret ebil project, Project Scoop, that Will from Will and Grace is investigating. It gets more and more complicated — the Bucky Balls are a code from the future — and we leave behind a lot of the classic simplicity of the book and 1971 movie.


That's the other problem with this version of Andromeda — the virus is built up to be such an incredible super-organism that mutates like five or six times (instead of, I think, three times in the book) and infects birds and rats. About three hours in, I started to wonder why everybody wasn't dead yet. Will from Will and Grace was running around the contagion zone for hours and hours, including one scene where he prays, and no infected birds or airborne radioactive strains do away with him. (We were hoping after a while.) Maybe Will and Moped Boy will get caught in a disaster together!


andromedastrain-02.jpgYet for all that, we did enjoy the new miniseries. And parts of it were fun to watch while tipsy from all those Wiscon parties. Plus there's very little else to watch on TV right now, until the Lost finale and the return of Sci Fi's Friday night lineup. Bottom line: If you think of it as "Mansquito with an A-list cast" (and the cast did a great job with what they were given) then you'll probably enjoy it a lot. Just don't compare it too much to Michael Crichton's best novel, or Robert Wise's taut medical thriller.







"

Voir en ligne : New "Andromeda" Strains Credulity [Andromeda Strain Review]

Sarkozy porte plainte contre un tee-shirt !



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18055383On se souvient qu'en octobre 2007, pour avoir placardé l'affiche ci-contre, des militants du syndicat étudiant UNEF avaient été embarqués au commissariat, au motif d' "offense au chef de l'État"*. Encore n'était-ce que le fait de policiers trop zélés, ayant englobé dans leur tâche du maintien de l'ordre public la défense de l'honneur outragé de sa majesté Sarkozy 1er. L'affaire est plus grave cette fois. Le président en personne a attaqué en justice un fabriquant de tee-shirts pour y avoir affiché le visuel ci-dessous.



logosarko38340L' "offense au chef de l'État", mentionnée dans un article de la loi de 1881 sur le droit de la presse, n'est pas invoquée. Quel motif alors pour la constitution de partie civile présidentielle ? Maître Roland Marmillot, avocat du fabricant, la société Arclo, précise : "Il n'y a qu'une seule instruction. D'autres entreprises sont concernées". Les tee-shirts Sarkozy ne sont en effet pas seuls à attirer les foudres de la justice, puisque d'autres créations d'Arclo sont attaquées par différentes marques pour "contrefaçon, modification de marque sans autorisation", leur logo étant détourné. Exemple : Malbarré pour Marlboro. Lacoste et Heineken font partie des plaignants. Le fabricant est aussi poursuivi pour "provocation à
une infraction en matière de stupéfiants" (la loi française est si restrictive que toute représentation ou évocation de la drogue peut tomber sous le coup de cette accusation) et, la meilleure, "incitation au terrorisme". Dans ce dernier cas, le motif imprimé sur le vêtement change la marque Kinder en Killer et l'œuf en chocolat en grenade... Incitation au terrorisme ! On en rirait si le sujet - la liberté d'expression - n'était si grave.



Revenons à la plainte présidentielle contre le fabricant : sur quoi se fonde-t-elle ? "Incitation au terrorisme", à cause du O de Sarkozy en forme de cible et des tâches de sang qui maculent le logo ? Plus sûrement "contrefaçon, modification de marque sans autorisation", ce qui revient à assimiler le patronyme présidentiel à une marque ! Grossier subterfuge pour museler la critique. Sarkozy avait déclaré préférer "l'excès de caricature à l'absence de caricature". Quand ça concerne les musulmans peut-être, mais pas s'il s'agit de lui ! La procédure judiciaire engagée par le chef de l'État contre le fabricant de tee-shirts est en tout cas très dangereuse : "Je dénonce cette dérive autoritaire attentatoire aux libertés", déclare Maître Roland Marmillot, dont nous partageons en l'occurrence l'indignation et les craintes.



* Lire à ce sujet La police défend le (doigt d')honneur présidentiel.

"

Voir en ligne : Sarkozy porte plainte contre un tee-shirt !

Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting



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mininova logoMininova is currently the most visited BitTorrent site, and with approximately 3.5 million visitors a day, the site has gathered a spot among the 50 most popular websites on the Internet.


When we reported about the 3 billionth download back in November, Erik from Mininova told TorrentFreak: “We hope to reach the 4 billion mark in 4 or 5 months from now”. He didn’t have to wait that long, as it only took 78 days before they got there. The TV-show category remains the most popular, approximately half of all downloads from Mininova are torrents relating to TV-episodes.


The popularity of Mininova became apparent a few weeks ago when the site was offline for nearly a day because of hardware issues. The millions of visitors had to go elsewhere to feed their BitTorrent habit, and as a result, other sites like Torrentz.com and SumoTorrent saw a huge traffic increase, and almost went down under the strain.


The Mininova team will continue to optimize the site in order to handle the continuous traffic increase. On top of this, they are also adding new services and features such as a content distribution platform for independent publishers, a music streaming feature, and more recently, video streaming.


From the looks of it, Mininova’s growth will not be halted anytime soon, unless there is outside intervention. Last week, the Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN announced that it will take legal action against the site, not to take it down, but to force it to filter copyrighted content. Erik from Mininova said in a response they “will proceed to court with full confidence,” and they will continue to serve torrents.




Mininova downloads since 2005.


mininova 5 billion


This is an article from: TorrentFreak


Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting





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Voir en ligne : Mininova, 5 Billion Downloads and Counting

L’encyclopédie Larousse est en ligne : de la concurrence pour Wikipedia



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encyclopedie-larousse


La célèbre encyclopédie Larousse est maintenant accessible en ligne gratuitement.


Voilà un “potentiel” concurrent pour Wikipedia.


Sur Larousse.fr vous pouvez apporter votre grain de sel aux articles en y apportant votre propre contribution.


La différence avec Wikipedia c’est que sur Larousse vous créez votre article et vous êtes le seul ensuite à pouvoir le modifier. Vous avez votre propre espace personnel sur lequel vous pouvez afficher votre profil (avec ou sans photo), vos sites internet, vos articles, etc…


La modération est effectuée par une cinquantaine de personnes de chez Larousse qui vérifie les articles, la fraîcheur des informations et les commentaires.


L’encyclopédie dispose de 150 000 articles et 10 000 photos en ligne.


Le modèle économique n’est pas encore défini et c’est loin d’être gagner pour rentabiliser la version en ligne.


Le site a été victime de son succès en restant inacessible le jour de son lancement. Cause: trop de visiteurs.


Point de vue référencement, navigation et partage des liens, ce n’est vraiment pas terrible à l’heure actuelle.


Premièrement, le serveur semble assez lent lorsqu’on recherche un article, comparé à celui de Wikipedia.


Deuxièmement, impossible de linker à une page précise !! exemple: Tennis linke à http://www.larousse.fr/LaroussePortail/encyclo/XHTML/EUL.Online/explorer.aspx qui ramène à la page d’accueil.

Et c’est comme ça pour toutes les pages de l’encyclopédie!


Espérons que Larousse corrige assez rapidement ses erreurs pour ses futures versions s’i y en a.




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Voir en ligne : L’encyclopédie Larousse est en ligne: de la concurrence pour Wikipedia

Eric Besson annonce la création d’un Conseil national du numérique (ITRmanager)



"A la veille des Assises du numérique, le secrétaire d'Etat en charge du Développement de l'économie numérique considère que le haut débit est un « bien essentiel » auquel ont..."

Voir en ligne : Eric Besson annonce la création d'un Conseil national du numérique (ITRmanager)


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