blog till you drop!
A cocktail of advertising, social media, and technology
Blogs are stronger, better and faster than ever!
Oct 27th
A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.These markets are conversations.
The Cluetrain Manifesto
According to a recent Wired article by Paul Boutin, blogging is dead. Interestingly, I read a similar article in French financial paper ‘Echos’ a couple of years ago that also predicted the end of blogs… and guess what? I read around 120 active blogs on a daily basis! The blogosphere is healthier than ever, and to quote Paul, the ‘amateur wordsmiths’ are in fact an amazing community to learn from!
Whilst I agree that the blogosphere can be littered with dead blogs, or a ‘a tsunami of paid bilge’, there are thousands of amazing active weblogs out there.
New tools such as Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook complement blogs but will never replace them. I use Twitter and Facebook to consolidate my existing relationship with bloggers, but 140 characters will never replace a blog post!
Twitter, FriendFeed and Flickr offer threaded conversations making it easy to reply to comments and interact with other users. Admittedly blogs are still a little behind when it comes to keeping track of ‘comments box’ conversations, but this is rapidly changing with the introduction of plugins such as phreadz, cocomments, or new kid on the block comment reply via email, which are turning blogs into interactive conversational tools.
It looks like quite a few members of the blogosphere disagree with Paul. I even wonder whether this article wasn’t written as a link bait; Technorati picked up 466 blog reactions (negative one would hope) to this very article.
On a different note, I’d like to welcome Rax to the blogosphere! There are still quite a few passionate bloggers out there after all 
Flickr is now conversational
Oct 6th
Observing the organic evolution of online communities is simply fascinating.
I’ve always loved taking photos, which probably explains why I am obsessed with Flickr! Despite my lack of interaction with other Flickr users, I tend check my photo stream many times a day… there is something strangely addicting about Flickr!
It seems that everybody’s doing some design update these days. First Facebook, then Mashable, and Flickr earlier last month joined the redesign craze.
It seems clear that Flickr wants to promote the use of its social features and the best photos from the community, rather than simply using Flickr as an online photo album. The new design succeeds in promoting new content, whilst allowing to keep track of comments, favourite photos and contacts updates.
But most importantly Flickr is now conversational, which is in my opinion the most exiting change that could happen within the Flickr community…
