Le Monde Does Big Splash on Robots

Paris' Le Monde does an extensive piece on Willow Garage's PR2; it makes a big splash in their Weekend magazine.

 

 

Stribe Opens its Social Network Platform

This week, Stribe opens its social network platform and brings together websites sharing the same interest. After 6 months of private beta, Stribe unveils a feature that enables websites to generate more traffic.

Stribe was a finalist during TechCrunch50 2009 and won the last LeWeb European competition startup. More than 10,000 websites have asked to beta test the Stribe service since September 2009, and several hundred websites received an invitation code to embed the service.

More Traffic

Traffic acquisition is an issue for every website. Stribe now helps websites to connect with social media and with other websites sharing the same interests to get more traffic. The entire installation process only requires sites to add one new line of code to their pages. Stribe designed viral mechanisms to let websites invite and connect with each other. All content generated by users will be indexed to improve SEO and drive more traffic to “stribed” websites.

All websites can look for communities, join them or create their own from Stribe.com to link with others and boost their visibility in a ring of similar sites. Most of Stribe's features are free, however there are additional premium modules that cost, such as the back office functionality that allows websites to track key metrics of social activity and manage online communities.

Le Monde's Fate: Over After 66 Years?

Like virtually every other newspaper in the world, Le Monde is losing cash. As respected by Europeans as the New York Times is to Americans, it appears that the 66-year old newspaper may be out of cash within a couple of weeks. Monday Note reports on the evolution of French press over the past several years that has led to this moment:

* A steady erosion in readership.

* A lack of budget discipline, made worse by loose governance.

* The core newsroom’s reluctance to support the digital strategy.

* The collective certainty the “brand” was too beautiful to fail and that a deep-pocketed philanthropist will inevitably show up at the right time to save the company.

* A difficulty to invest into the future, to test new ideas, to built prototypes, or to invest in decisive technologies.

* A bottomless investment in the heavy-industry part of the supply chain, in costly printing facilities.

* An excessive reliance on public subsidies which account for about 10% of the industry’s entire revenue. Compared to Sweden, French newspapers have 3 times less readers, but each one gets 5 times more subsidies.

They are apparently seeking (needing?) at least €100m. Filloux gives an excellent account of its history, including his opinion and an assessment. He also includes a great set of stats and raw numbers. Take a look at the past three years. Source: Monday Note.

Their opinion of what they need? At a minimum, Filloux suggests an editorial and industrial project, restructuring, a strong and decisive human resources initiative and a long term approach - in other words, renovation won't be done overnight. If only newspapers understood this five years ago and started then, we wouldn't be reading about so many newspaper death marches ONLINE.

Pearltrees Raises $1.6 Million

Pearltrees, a social web curation tool based in Paris-France, announced that it has raised $1.6 million in funding from European entrepreneurs and business angel investors, to accelerate international development.

Since the launch of the Pearltrees beta version in December 2009 at LeWeb in Paris, the social curation tool has developed a strong community. In order to accelerate the international development of Pearltrees, especially in the US, shareholders of the French start-up raised additional funding, totaling $4.6 million to-date.

Since last December, the growing community has pearled and organized nearly two million web pages. Moving far beyond simple bookmarking, Pearltrees users can select each other's pearltrees as a way to follow the topics they care about. Everyone can now browse pearltrees created by passionate users on various subjects, including food, politics, media, arts, travel, music and countless others.

Pearltrees Version 1.0 will be released later this year. Also refer to VentureBeat on the funding announcement.

Bookmarking Obsolete: New Needs & Approaches

Mike Elgan's Computerworld post entitled Why Bookmarking is Obsolete brings up several useful and forward thinking points.

He writes about the web's growth since 1991 and says, "even after all these years, the way we find, navigate and save content on the Web works pretty much like it always did. Here's a page with text. Some of the words are hyperlinked, so when you click on them, you open another page. If you want to save something, there's a wide variety of tools that help you do so, but most people use the bookmarking feature built into their browsers, or social bookmarking sites."

The way we discover, find, curate and then access that content for reference later on is changing and needs to change if search and organization of content important to us is going to be truly useful. Enter human curation at its best. Elgan writes about social curation tool Pearltrees, a French-based start-up I consult to.

He explains its differentiation. "If you're a casual Web surfer looking for general content, Google, Bing Yahoo or Wikipedia are probably your best options for finding content. If you care mostly about what your friends think, then Facebook or Twitter or any number of the new social content-sharing tools might satisfy you. But for deep, savvy content, Pearltrees might be the best resource out there. It offers an easy way to find a large number of people who are very passionate about a variety of subjects and who have collected the kind of online content that true aficionados are seeking."

Photo credit: Media Futurist

Pearling the Best Food in San Francisco

I've always been a bit of a natural curator in that I love to collect things, save things, organize things, and later access those things for customization and sharing. Curation on the web is always more useful and relevant when it is "human creation" by people you trust. Wouldn't you rather go to a restaurant recommendation from someone you know and trust rather than through a random Yelp rating from someone who may or may not share your taste?

There's the organization aspect: I never got into delicious for example (it's just not for me), nor was I able to get my head around OneNote although I tried and my left brain tech buddy swears by it. I still use alphabetical lists by category and for the most part it works fairly well.

Then there's the human curation of that data into a format that makes sense for you and which may also be useful for others who think like you. Enter Pearltrees, a French company I've been consulting to, which is all about human curation of the web. Every time I play with Pearltrees or see newbies playing with it, I discover new ways the tool can be useful.

For example, during a food bloggers luncheon yesterday, I couldn't put my finger on the name of a San Francisco restaurant and googling what I thought it was or its category or location didn't seem to help. I tried my lists and sadly, it didn't seem to be there either.

And so off I went to Pearl. I had already created a Food Pearltree as well as a San Francisco one, so I decided to do a mashup and then add subcategories in a way that made sense to me. Here's the result of one new Pearltree I created called San Francisco restaurants:

Within the above categories I created, I can get as detailed and granular as I want. For example, take a look at my San Francisco sushi restaurants Pearltree in more details. Over time, I'll add to this Pearltree and perhaps borrow other people's ideas and suggestions for sushi I might like to try.

Rather than share an entire Pearltree of content inside my blog, I could choose to just share one pearl alone. For example, below is a pearl of some of my favorite Italian restaurants in San Francisco.

  

I'm looking forward to seeing new ways people will use Pearltrees to share things like recipes, recommended hikes, the best boutiques in a particular city, food and wining pairings, and perhaps a Pearltree of restaurants to avoid in Berlin so I can be better prepared before my next trip to Europe. Quality human curation is becoming increasingly important and it's exciting to be part of this Web 3.0 innovation that is moving things further along.

LeWeb10's Theme is (drumroll please) PLATFORMS

Loic and Geraldine Le Meur give us a taste of what is coming for this year's LeWeb in Paris at Les Docks, slated for December 8-9, 2010. This year's theme is platforms and they plan to cover the platform spectrum, from browsers, mobile and PC to the iPad, TV, and social media. They have a great line-up of speakers confirmed already and it's only June.

Top Twitter Cities

As an avid tweeter and someone who has lived in countless countries over the years, I found this chart incredibly fascinating....twitter usage and popularity around the world, starting with London in first place, LA in second place and Chicago in third (a surprise). The rest of the line-up through #70 below.

SUPER EMBED: Cool Discovery from within ONE Window

I've been playing around with Pearltrees' very cool "Super Embed" feature, launched this week. They'll be at the Moscone Center on Wednesday for Launch Pad, one of only 5 companies to present on-stage at Web 2.0 Expo.

Here's what I did to create the embedded Pearltree below. FREE and QUICK, I signed up for an account at Pearltrees and created a Pearltree called Down the Avenue, the name of my primary blog. Then, within the Pearltree, I created "Pearls" for about a dozen categories within my blog, largely categories of industries and areas of interests in recent years.

Next, I click on the Pearltree and hit SHARE and Voila, I'm given code to embed in my blog. It's that easy. Now, I can display one quick snapshot of a number of categories (which comprise a series of posts, articles, videos, etc) in one window, and people can view all of it without leaving my blog.

Each Pearl will take you to all the blog posts in my blog under that category. The Video Pearl will show you all the videos I've created. How cool is that?

With the onslaught of information we’re being hit with daily online, it’s impossible to keep up with content and even harder to discover or curate that content into something that is meaningful and relevant for us.

Imagine the possibilities using Pearltrees for your own blog or website. What's more, you can grab other people's Pearls and discover new people and interests within Pearltrees. This is creation, organization and curation at its best. SO, GO - Create, Envision and Explore!! Try it out.

Pearltrees Unveils SUPER EMBED at Web 2.0 Expo

Client Pearltrees is unveiling its new “Super Embed” feature this week at Launch Pad on Wednesday afternoon at the Moscone in San Francisco. They announced their new feature and other updates in a Beta 0.7 release today at Web 2.0 Expo.

If you're not familar with Pearltrees, it's a tool that allows you to organize and curate a series of web pages quickly and easily. You can not only discover new people and interests from within Pearltrees, but you can now display, share and display those web pages as "Pearls" inside your blog or website, hence the cool and appropriate name for the new feature: "Super Embed."

With this latest release, bloggers, journalists and Internet users can identify and organize a series of web pages about a particular topic, create one ‘tree’ that houses all that content and then embed that Pearltree in their blog or website so people can view everything they have discovered about that topic in one single window – all without leaving the blog.

Additional major improvements featured in this release include a Pearltree add-on for Chrome, real-time notifications about comments a Pearltree has received, as well as when other Pearltrees’ users “pick” or subscribe to a particularly Pearltree, a simplified user interface and a new social search engine that gives users a visual representation of the relevance of search results based upon proximity. This helps users see at a glance which results are closest to their search.

Pearltrees’ latest version transforms the process of discovering, organizing and sharing the things people find on the web while enabling bloggers, journalists and other content creators to add a new level of depth and context to the articles they post online.

Easy to integrate into all sites and blogs, Pearltrees’ new beta brings transforms web navigation and discovery. Simply click on the Pearltree you want to embed, click share and you are given options to share in Facebook, Twitter, or to embed directly into your blog, customizeable by size.

WHY THE SUPER EMBED WILL MATTER TO BLOGGERS & JOURNALISTS

For writers, users can discover a series of web pages and explore them in-depth without ever leaving your site. Users are exposed to a complete experience about a topic in one easy-to-navigate window.

With readers spending more time on your site, you have more time to engage with them and build a deeper relationship.

Easy-to-use, simply copy an HTML code from Pearltrees, not unlike you would grab HTML code from YouTube, and paste it into your site or blog. One click activates the window and simple arrows permit navigation from one page to the other. Suggested downloads are clearly signposted so you can start using it within minutes.

WHY PEARLTREES SUPER EMBED WILL MATTER TO THE REST OF US

There is simply too much content in too many places on the Web and while various engines help filter what you’re looking for, user-generated content, aggregators and contributors such as Yelp, Digg and more, can only get you so far. While useful, they do not curate the web for you nor do they allow you to participate in the curation process.

Smart curation online is necessary in the next generation of the web – users will demand smarter ways to find content and services that help them save time and find their passions and interests faster and easier.

SOCIAL SYSTEM & SEARCH

When you pearl the same pages or use a Pearltree (part of another user account), you construct your account of course and automatically constitute your “interest graph”. Simultaneously, a search engine explores which connections already exist between users. Therefore, when a search is launched, you are presented with suggested Pearltrees which are relevant and of interest to your world.

Pearltrees addresses web curation by enabling anyone to individually organize their web and extend it to other people’s organization of the web. By doing so, you can discover new content from people with common interests.

Check out a couple of bloggers who have used the "Super Embed" feature to show the power of curation and discovery with Pearltrees: Michelle Kraus from Huffington Post uses an embedded Pearltree to show article references for her article and Beth Blecherman shows Parent Online Content in an embedded Pearltree on her TechMamas blog (moms and dads alike).