A Fresh Start (up)

After reading “The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life”, I was amazed by the number of “touristic” places to visit in Second Life, and by the fact that the authors of this book have written this book as a traditionnal touristic guide.

I have just published a review of this book and of the most surprising places in Second Life here on Tech It Easy. 

What do you think about this rapid creation of such an elaborated virtual world, which now offers touristic places, sports, cultural activities, etc… ?

I have a passion for things and sites allowing a maximum level of personalization (hence my interest for avatars, you may have noticed ;-)). So logically I am also really interested in personalized products, the symbol of them being Tshirts.

When I analyze the market of user generated Tshirts, I notice that the trend is towards more and more personalization. If you are deprived of design skills as I am, then basically you can vote for great designs and choose the one you prefer (Threadless); at the next level you can propose a slogan (Threadless again), or you can mix multiple designers’ items to create your own unique shirt (Innertee), or you can submit your idea to find a designer to create it (ThoseShirts), finally you can create your own products with your own designs or pictures even if you have absolutely no talent (Zazzle).

But what strikes me most in this trend is that at the end, if we want a beautiful AND highly personalized T-shirt or mug, then the best is having design skills by ourselves! All the previous websites are trying to reduce the need of having own design skills by connecting users’ needs with designers’ talent, and that is amazing, but every time I go to Threadless I can’t help thinking “this shirt is great, but the design would have been better in purple, with a little slogan here, and a little angel there”. In a word, to be fully satisfied with my purchase, I would like the maximum level of customization, and even if it is exactly what those sites are trying to provide, it will never be the same than creating your own design by yourself. To be sincere I get more and more frustrated not to have design skills, and I will probably buy the book Design It Yourself (image of this article) which try to help dummies like me to acquire basic skills.

So what are your expectations about “customized products”? Is the trend of personalization going on in the Internet tends to push you to develop design skills?

I promised myself not to make duplicated content on this blog, but in this case, even if the whole blogosphere has already created a Simpson avatar, I couldn’t resist it. Especially since Béa challenged me to do it in the comments of the previous article…

So here she is, isn’t she cute? In case you haven’t noticed yet, I love avatars and I love purple!

And finally, just a quick poll to see if my readers are fans of The Simpsons or not:

After my cute Voki, I wanted to test Gizmoz, which is another avatar app with better personnalization tools (3D + upload of your own picture). Sincerely the result is amazing (and I kind of like this hair cut, not that I will try it for real!), except that… I scare myself !!!! So I won’t change from Voki to Gizmoz, unless I want my readers to be so afraid that they will be forced to read…

Express Yourself with Gizmoz Video Clips

I sincerely hate to criticize some services especially since I wouldn’t probably do better,  but in the case of Spock.com, I just can’t help myself. In any case thank you very much to GuiM.fr for having invited me. 

Spock is the new trendy people search engine, supposed to crawl the Internet looking for information on you. It is also exactly as I would describe Ziki.com, which is a service I really like which aggregates your public information on one page and even allows you to top Google results by buying keywords for you. It is exactly what I love in the Internet: being able to MANAGE all the information you make public without sometimes even realizing all the impacts on what you display online. But even if the basic definition of those two websites is the same, Spock presents MAJOR disadvantages compared to Ziki.

Indeed it allows other people to interact with your profile, which means that your Spock profile, likely to have a good Google ranking, may contain wrong or defamatory information. Of course it is a very “2.0″ service, as the community contributes to give an image of you, but I really don’t think that it is desirable to let other people play with such an important thing as your virtual identity. All the virtual identity services such as Ziki are trying to improve your “Net rep”, whereas Spock just don’t understand the main point here and proposes a service which doesn’t meet current expectations from my point of view.

Even worse, but less importantly, their crawler is apparently not as good as the Ziki one, and their design is just a nightmare (really bad for a personnal page): personnaly I really wouldn’t want an employer to see my Spock profile. On the contrary, it is a pleasure to show you my Ziki profile. And just for info, Ziki offers 100 business cards with the cool Ziki logo here; a great way to combine online and offline representation.

And if you (despite all) want to try Spock, do not hesitate to ask me for invites in the comments.

I have been on Pownce for 2 weeks now, and I have already made a review here. As I said, the product is great but as my friends are not on it, I will definitely keep on using Twitter.

But there is one thing that I really don’t understand: why do people that I know nothing about add me as a friend on Pownce? I can understand that you follow somebody you don’t know but if  he says interesting things (I follow some people I don’t even know on Twitter, and reciprocally) but why the hell adding somebody as your friend who says nothing at all (I have posted 2 updates on Pownce in 2 weeks!) ? I receive less invites on Twitter than I do on Pownce, whereas I often update my Twitter: am I more interesting when I am silent? I hope not

So I can’t help thinking that some first movers on Pownce try to get as many people as possible in their network so that they can have a captive audience (especially since Pownce send you emails for each of your network’s updates!). In a word, I find that Pownce is becoming really intrusive, and I am impatient to see people’s reaction to that. 

If you really want to try, I still have some invites left, one comment and they are yours

Due to the great feedbacks I have about my “Pieces of art” serie I will continue it. Today a Facebook application displaying a virtual representation of your network. It is hard to say if this is a real form of art but it is a visual representation with a social project, which is why I put it in this section. You can see mine in large view here. To install this Facebook app click here.

If you know other artistic initiatives based on communities, I would be glad to read about them, and it would help me with my working paper

Please leave me a link in the comments so that I can see your Friend wheel!

eBay has launched an advertising campaign to celebrate the fun of auctions: just as when you generate endorphins (like after a sports effort), you generate “windorphins” when you just win an eBay auction. And eBay even proposes to represent visually  your windorphin, so here is mine, create yours!

I know that a lot of people have already read The E-Myth revisited by Michael E. Gerber and that it is quite an old book, but I have been amazed by the simplicity and the truthfulness of how the author describes the mind of a business owner. I have quite a good experience of very small businesses: I have created one, my mother has created her own fashion shop and my father owns his fishing boat. And what Gerber describes is exactly the mistakes my parents and I have done in our businesses. I have made a more detailed review of this book on Tech It Easy here, and I strongly invite you to read it, but in a few words, the psychological brakes which prevent owners from creating efficient businesses:

- Owners focus on the product rather than on the business (my mother always tells me that her clothes are fantastic so she does not understand why she does not manage to make ends meet).

- Owners build a business based on their talent and personality rather than on processes, which makes impossible to grow the business or to create others on the same model.

- Owners go to work in their business rather than on it.

And to finish, just to show you that this guy is great:

Just a quick article to tell you that I will be off to Megève for a few days to milk cows and to enjoy fresh air. I am a bit worried to know that I will have no Internet access, but I hope I will survive

I have no “babysitter” for this blog so I won’t probably answer my comments (unless I spend the entire trip looking for a cybercafé, which sounds totally lame but totally like me). So apologies for the lack of update for a few days, I will come back with great articles after that!