Sandrine Plasseraud

Metro picked up on the French Twitter Chuck Norris joke!

Yesterday I was mentioning that a French Twitterer @ronlinfirmier made a joke about Gmail being unavailable because "When Chuck Norris uses Gmail, the whole world waits until he's done"... Well this morning his quote was mentioned (the translated version of course) in the London Metro... William... Fame is also waiting for you on the other side of the Channel Tunnel ;-)

By the way, in my note yesterday, I was mentioning my doubts about cloud computing... well, let me tell you that tonight, after my 3-year-old Macbook died twice but later on 'resusitated' twice that I'm now not only backing up my whole hard drive but also very much looking forward to the cloud computing age ;-) 

When Chuck Norris uses Gmail, everyone wait until he's finished!

One of my favorite book is Ravage, a book I read whilst at school and that was written in 1943, by René Barjavel, a French science-fiction author. Ravage is a story of a much more advanced civilisation that falls to its knees when electricity suddenly disappears... 

Now you're probably wondering why I'm quoting Barjavel in a blog post titled with Chuck Norris' name?! Well, as Gmail failed us worlwide this morning for a few hours at least, I came accross a brilliant joke on Twitter explaining the Gmail fail (from another French writter actually: @ronlinfirmer): "Quand Chuck Norris utilise Gmail, tout le monde attend qu'il aie fini" or in English (I hope the translation makes sense!): "When Chuck Norris uses Gmail, everyone wait until he's finished!". The joke seems to be amusing more people than just myself as it got RT'd quite a lot today including by famous French Twitter user/blogger @ChauffeurDeBuzz.

So back to Ravage and Chuck Norris using Gmail whilst us lot wait until he's finished to be able to use our email account again... This latest Google failure (remember the huge Google Fail on 31/01/09 which put the whole www searches on hold for hours?) is yet another scary moment when you suddenly think... Crap... What would we do if the whole Internet went down? What would happen of our economies, which are currently so reliant on communication and especially online communication?! If you've never read Ravage from Barjavel, now is a good time to go back to your "classics". As I can't remember the ending, I might do the same actually!

Now, back to good news... I was one of the first this morning to raise my concerns about "Cloud Computing" when I was unable to use my emails for a few hours. But apparently, cloud computing is safe, as proved by the issue this morning whereby most of us (not me!) were apparently still able to get their emails on Gmail via their iphones for example. Which means that data wasn't lost and therefore, in short, cloud computing (apparently) wins... And for those of you who've never heard about cloud computing, in a nutshell it's like this: in the past you were storing all your photos on your computer and using tons of memory - right now you can store all your photos on Flickr. Cloud computing will let you access your information from any computer in the world as the data will be stored, not on your computer but in some servers... Reassured now? lol Well, personnaly, I'll wait a few years before totally switching to cloud computing and I might carry on saving my data onto a hard drive for years as I do nowadays for my photos, saved both on my laptop drive and on Flickr...

All about Twestival Paris

Just in case you've missed out about Twestival Paris, here is a quick summary of the event...

Last Thursday (12th of Feb), over 185 cities in the world were organising a Twestival, an event where Twitter users could not only meet in real life and have fun but also raise money for charity: water, a non-profit organisation which brings clean, safe drinking water to people in developing countries. FYI, one out of 6 person in the world has no access to clean water and this is the biggest cause of mortality in the world.

I thought it would be a good idea for We Are Social to organise the Parisian edition of the Twestival as part of our launch on the French market and that's how we ended up in Paris last Thursday, at the Hard Rock Café to be precise, along with about 100 Twitter users... A nice evening -although stressful for the organisers i.e. ourselves lol-, a cool concert by the band 1973, lots of goodies to win at the raffle, and some live connections with 3 other Twestival cities: London, Lille and Clermont-Ferrand, via a Skype video call.

Along with the other European Twestival organisers, I was also doing some footage for Techfluff.tv so if you've missed out on what's been happening all over Europe with the Twestival, check out the Techfluff.tv European Twestival Special video below:

Bon et puis pour la VF de cet article, je vous laisse lire ma note sur le blog de We Are Social ou bien regarder cette petite vidéo ci-dessous...

My Twitter followers

Not very useful I guess but nevermind, here is a mosaic of my Twitter followers ;-)

via Raphael - Get your own mosaic here.

Blogging, Twitting & the Art of Conversation

(En Français plus bas)

Once again, here I am apologizing about the fact I've been neglecting my blog for the last 10 days... What's happened with me? I started blogging in August 2005 and up until recently I used to blog every single day or at least 4-5 times per week. I've certainly been busy recently (not that I wasn't before though) but with a job + the Twestival Paris to organise, it's been quite full on (not to mention the blogging on We Are Social ;-)

But that's not all really. Twitter came along as well...

 

When I started blogging about 3 years ago, what I really enjoyed about it is the number of people I was able to exchange with through blogging, through the comments, but also in real life at blogger events. Blogging was and is certainly also for me an exercise which allows me to structure some of the ideas I come across ; but it's also and mostly a way to connect with people...

Nowadays I feel I'm finding through Twitter what I can no longer find through blogging. Don't get me wrong, it's quite new: in 2007 when I joined Twitter, the audience was so small that it was difficult to have a conversation with hardly anyone. Nowadays though, I have daily conversations with people, I meet up with people from the Twitter community, at events like the Shoreditch Twit or Twestival, or even just random Twitter event like the one I'm going this Friday.

Sure you can have conversations with the readers of your blog, through comments but is it me or less and less people tend to comment on blogs? Maybe it's just my blog but it certainly feel like this. And because Twitting is less time consuming it allows you to be more spontaneous, to converse more.

Nowadays I find that even Flickr is becoming more conversational than blogs, with people living comments on my pictures, asking questions about them. And this applies to Facebook as well of course.

Will I stop blogging? I thought about it but I don't think so. We'll see, maybe one day but not for now. Or maybe I'll change the structure of my blog (any suggestions are welcome!). In the meantime I'll try and start blogging in English and in French (just to make things simplier lol). Just because I miss writing in French really.

By the way, am I the only one to wonder about blogging and the art of conversation? I guess when a blog is more 'personal', blogging is conversational - maybe it's purely and simply because my blog is not so personal...

In French below.