Take a walk on the wild side

Think of the web as a dangerous jungle. They are many spiders, snakes, the moist heat...you can wander during many days in this jungle, looking for a lost treasure or so...Think of yourself as Indiana Jones in this jungle. You're may be alone, but you are strong.

To keep your mental sanity, you have to be brave.

Here comes 10 rules mediavibes suggest you to follow :
1. Your best friend can be your ennemy. Trust nobody but yourself. It's so easy for anyone to change identity that you cannot be a 100% sure that you are talking with the person you think.

2. Thanks to rule number one, don't be afraid to change your own identity. It might seems a little weird, but you end up enjoying it. If you don't feel like giving your real name and adress for every website you visit, you can create fake mail adresses that would have one function : to gets all the newsletters and spams.

When I was an intern in a e-marketing company I had to do what is being called " viral marketing" : I had to post comments to encourage the dialogue between internauts. I also had to go on the pages that were taking about the company I worked for and post good comments about this, and namned the company in order to improve its natural classification by Google.

This wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't had the possibility to create as lany accounts on hotmail, gmail and others as possible !

3. Let your private life stay private. Don't tweet every six seconds about being dumped or having loosing two pounds. No-one cares. Let the your private pages be all about interestingaspects of your life, not just about your daily problems.

4. Don't be afraid to talk with people you don't know well. You might discover some interesting personnalities. Some people are so shy that they feel better talking on a screen. You can discover some wonderful persons thanks to a computer screen. Don't forget that.

5. Always save. All your datas. ALL. Your favorite movies, your favorite pictures...SAVE IT. A laptop only last a couple of years. You cannot avoid the sudden and mysterious death of the machine. Be careful.

6. Create the buzz. If you want people to talk about something that truely interests you, and you want to know a more general opinion about it, talk about it ! Post about it, tweet about it. In the end, you will have reactions.

7. Give yourself a break. You don't need to be always connected. Manage yourself a couple of days off per month. Don't be a netjunkie; proove yourself and to your friends, that you are not totally addicted. It would do you good, seriously.

8. Don't be intrusive. It's not because some people don't respect rule number 3 that you have to pay attention and scruit all the little details abour their private. If you wanna more about somebody, don't be afraid to talk directly to him/her.

9.Remember that internet is transparent. You cannot act or say anything on a forum because you think that the web is totally anonymous. An IP adress can easily be traced. Restrain yourself. The Jungle is wild but it has to stay a place of respect.

10.Follow you instinct. Don't be afraid to click, to visit, to test. You might regret it later.

E-book or not e-book ?

Moreover, an e-book doesn't have the "magic" of the good old book : you can't wander in the alleys of a library, finding "magically" (and with a little bit of luck) exactly what you needed from the beginning !
With an e-book you have to know exactly what you want to read from the beginning, no time for chance ! You cannot be struck by a stunning title or an original cover just as if you were looking along the stairs of a bookcase....

So, in the end, what would I choose ?
Well, even if i'm not feeling exactly comfortable with reading on a screen, I would definitely at least TRY an e-book.
I would go for an e-book that is thin, light, and very easy to carry. I would also choose a model that is discreet : I on't want to show off with it.

And because I'm a bit slow for everything that concerns technologies, I would go for a model that is simple to use, very instinctive. Thanks to websites such as Wired, we can be helped in our search of the e-book that suits us the most.
Since I will be using my e-book just as a test, I would go for the cheapest and trendiest model like the $250 upstart Cool-er e-book reader.

However, I think that thanks to this "magic" that the book has, I would also stick to my beloved books whose corned pages are full of memories.

My video resume

I tried to make it simple.
enjoy !

The only thing I know, Is that I don't know anything( Socrates)

What a wide space Internet is.
A wide space that we explore a little bit more almost everyday.
This exploration is possible thanks to many tools. We can create, read, see, have access to web contents thanks to this tools.
You don't have to be a total geek to understand MSN or Facebook. But even with almost ten years of internet connection, I still have internet issues, and things that I don't know about.

I'm gonna have to admitt publically my ignorance. Harsh times to come :

• I don't understand ANYTHING to html

When I write "anything" I mean "ANYTHING". And even when I try I don't. And this is pretty frustrating. For instance, for this blog, I wish I could change my common template or be able to code these little online streaming music players like jiwa's or deezer's. But I simply can't.

Because everytime I try I have to cope with an html code that I have to insert on the code of my pages and it doen't work. It seems quite simple, it is explained on many web pages by nice, toughtful geeks who are willing to share their knowledge on the world wide web, ligthening the fact that html is not a code : it's just a language that everyone is capable to learn, like english or french.

You just have to copy and paste a line of the code, a series of letters and signs written in a particular order... and ta-dam it appears on your screen !

Except that it never does this . The only new thing I can see is a error message. But someday I will suceed. Someday I will because I know how important it is if I want to improve my blog. I'm also very aware that the whole communication sector, professionally speaking, is now completely linked to e-communications, and I wanna accomplished myself in my work, i'll have to know how to handle one of Internet's most basic and useful tool.

• The RSS Agregator

I'm very fond of it. As an average geek, I must admitt that I enjoy these little babes. But I really can't fix them in my own blog. I don't know where to place the logo, I don't think that people could actually enjoy an RSS agregator in my blog in particular...

And I don't really understand the RSS agregator pages, the links are a little overwhelming, there are so many options, so many clickables links in a netvibes page for instance that I can't find anywhere to click except on these big images shown by the page.
There are so many informations at the same time that I can't find one that interests me enough.
Consequently, as a user, my knowledge of the RSS agregator is terribly superficial.

But I know that a RSS is great way for an internaut like me, also jumping for one interesting page to another, that I have to acquire some discipline in order to learn more, to grab the better directly from the pages I'm the most intersted in, and to be more efficient in my researches on my favourite webistes.

• e-learning :

What "the things I don't know" are pointing at, is that Internet can be the greatest place to learn. It has the bst professors, the best library, the biggest bank of audio, video or text documents ever. And there are many teachers totally devoted to teach you how to use html or be a pro of the RSS agregator.
Thanks to the french CNED, you can even prepare France big exams from your home, reading the courses and doing the homework from your computer and send it by mail to your professor.
Or, like we are doing in celsa, have along-distance relationship that works, using webcam and msn to directly communicate with your teacher,and unsing a blog paltform to do your homework.
Internet has enver-ebding possibilities, the fact that its contents are mostly free, and acessible from any place and the world makes it almost universal. And universal is a virtue we seek for when it comes to education.

CyberCrime : a new war on terror ?

Cybercrime. We can think of it as a remote, weird, isolated fact that only concerns professional hackers and pirates, but as Internet use increases, users are seen, then the opportunity for any crime that can be commited using the Internet as a medium will also be increasing.

There are many types of crimes that are perpetrated using the web, financial crimes, identities being misued, sexual or racist contents circulating... I'll try to focus on cybercime that are taking place in "real life" and which are posted on Youtube later on.

• Not so funny Games

Cyber criminals aren't all professional hackers who are willing to capitalise on people's reliance on their computers in their daily lives or pedophiles using the net as an well-hidden and well-organized network. The cybercriminal can have a very familiar and innocent faces. innocent? For sure. Some of them are not even aware that they are actually commiting an e-crime !

What are they doing exactly ?
Well, they slap, injure, assault people randomly in the streets. And they tape it. And then, they post these on Youtube.

Who are these people exactly ?
Mostly teenagers. Mostly stupid teenagers to my mind. They're used, from their first step to their first degree to be photographed, to be taped for all these "greats steps" in their lives and to share these moments with all their relatives. Thanks to social networks, myspace pages or Youtube, they're now free to share on their own initiative the visual documents showing moments they are proud of. Even if there is nothing to be proud of.

If I say that they're maybe unaware that posting this actually doubles the importance of the crime they've comitted by agressing is simple : YouTube doesn't have a clear policy concerning what's being broadcasted.The society only declares in its terms of use that's it's not responsible for the contents that the user broadcasts. And most people while creating an YouTube account don't even give a glance to the terms of use. They don't even know that posting this is forbidden and illegal.

• Smooth criminal

On the net, the victims have to front a new humiliation, after being mistreated in public, they have to cope with a public image being harshly damaged. By the time they realized that their agression is on the web, the video had all the time to create its own buzz among the internauts who are craving this kind of dirt.

Why does it takes so much time ?
Because the process to report a shocking video is long. The person being molested has to notice the video (some of the victims are even unaware that there was a video taken), to denounce it to YouTube, to explain why, then Youtube has to check the video, to stop the broadcast...But nothing hardly ever happens for the one who post it, because while registering as a Youtube user, you're are not obliged to give you real name...And a simple IP adress can just help to find which computer has been used to post, but not the identity of the one who posts.


That's why people can be easily blackmailed by anydbody who has a compromising video of them, and threatens to post it. These theme is a very actual problem ; cases like this participates to the dramatic moment in Desperate Housewives, or in the last Ken Loach movie Looking for Eric.

Facing these unpunished criminal hidden behind a computer screen, are we completely harmless?

• War on Terror

In French Law, the fact to tape and broadcast an agression is, in court, a heavy aggraving circumstance.

I think there should be more cooperation from Youtube and others websites dedicated to videos sharing, in order to restrain as much as possible the broadcast of these contents. To my mind, the terms of use should appear more clearly for anyone joining YouTube and much more employees hired in the department of reported contents, in order to stop the share of these compromising videos as quickly as possible.

I also believe that a work should be done upstreamby these wbesites . These teenagers can be educated, and be aware of the possible sanctions they can suffer, and being taught about the moral aspect of any agression and how compromising it can be for their victims, and for them as well. Maybe this work could be done by schools as well, using computing classes not only to learn about the technics of the web, but also to know more about its ethics!