Twitter

Meet Weibo!

It is a Chinese version of Twitter - it literally means micro-blog - that expects around 150 million users by the end of 2011.

Helped by the diffusion of mobile phones with advanced features, the number of micro-bloggers in China is expected to grow extremely fast in the coming years thanks to the 10 million users joining every… month. Its top 100 users have a whopping 180 million of followers.

And Twitter in all of this? Well, like Facebook, it remains officially blocked for the time being in China, except for a handful of sophisticated users who can route around the firewall. That said, like with other web applications (e.g., search engines) the Chinese version looks very much like the original non-Chinese version but with added features that better match Chinese users’ needs - for instance, Chinese users tend to enjoy following celebrities’ micro-blogs.

My wish for micro-blogs? A service that translates them in the language of your choice.

Lift11 is starting at 2pm this Wednesday. You will be able to follow the conference through three main channels:

Live video stream
Organized with the help of LiveStream. Find the stream here and send us your questions and comments, we will add them to the questions we relay on stage.

Twitter
Two ways to follow the conference: follow the official Lift account for updates from the team, and the #lift11 hashtag for all that is said during the conference.

Blog
We're pretty old school, so we also have a blog. Follow it (RSS here) to get the latest news from the conference. We have scheduled a post that will go live at the beginning of each event so that should keep you informed through the conference on who is speaking now.

Last but not least, you can join the Lift page on Facebook to get updates directly in your stream.

A new research by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has come up with several interesting findings. The study "was designed to examine the media coverage that occurs when technology news crosses beyond technology-oriented outlets or news sections to the top of the American news agenda—to front-pages, the national nightly news, cable prime-time and other general interest news outlets. It did not delve into specialty publications or sections."

• The press reflects exuberance about gadgets and a wonder about the corporations behind them, but wariness about effects on our lives, our behavior and the sociology of the digital age.
• The mainstream media’s coverage of technology was not vast. It made up less than 1.6% of the total coverage over the course of the year, ranking it 20th out of the 26 identified topics. That puts technology news in same range as the environment, sports and education. And while it trails far behind crime (4.7%), it comes in ahead of religion (.6%) and immigration (.9%).
• The study examined which technology companies generated the most media attention in these venues. Apple, with its flashy press events and often drawn out releases of new products, narrowly outpaced Google in total coverage. Twitter and Facebook ranked third and fourth. Microsoft, on the other hand, once the feared technology behemoth, fell far behind—attracting just a fifth of the coverage of Apple and less than half that of Twitter.
• For Apple, the most heavily covered technology company, 42% of the stories described the company as innovative and superior, and another 27% lauded its loyal fan base. But there were doubts. The most common such negative thread, that Apple products don’t live up to the hype, appeared in 17% of stories about Apple. For Google, the company’s advancements in making content easier to find topped its coverage at 25%. But it was only half as likely as Apple to be framed as having superior, innovative products (20%).

Link

Malcom Gladwell debunks a few myths about the role of Twitter during the iranian revolution. Simply put, there was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West

“It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Link

Quite a change of tune from the earlier articles praising twitter's role during the protest, and probably much closer to the truth. The course of events is still subject to a lot of debate, all the way to Wikipedia whose article on the matter sees its neutrality disputed.

Advertisement: The dynamics of communities will be one of the themes discussed at Lift11. Get your ticket at the early bird price of 590chf for three days!

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"WEB PUISSANCE 2", LA REVOLUTION DES DONNEES PARTAGEES

Session 1: La nouvelle science des données

>Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Indian Prime Minister - Qu'est-ce que l'innovation indienne a à nous apprendre?
>Yan Moullier Boutang, - Quelles implications pour l'émergence des connaissances à partir d'immenses gisements de données?
>Fabien Girardin, urban data researcher - Visualisation de l'activité urbaine à partir des données numériques
>Jan Blom, Nokia research center - Comment les usagers de téléphones mobiles pourraient ils être plus que des capteurs de données?

Session 2: Les données publiques, nouveau gisement d'innovation et de participation

>Jarmo Eskelinen - Données publiques ouvertes: l'exemple finlandais, des apps pour la democracy
>Michael Cross, Comment les données publiques peuvent-elles être utilisées? L'initiative "Free our data": http://freeyourdata.org
>Hugues Aubin - Données publiques ouvertes et transports publics à Rennes

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"FAB LABS", REINVENTER LA CONCEPTION ET LA PRODUCTION INDUSTRIELLES

Session 3: Objets de demain: conception et nouveaux enjeux

>Matt Cottam, PDF Tellart - Quels nouveaux matériels pour l'informatique pervasive et la fabrication personnelle?
>JL Fréchin & U Petrevski - Hacker les machines industrielles pour concevoir des objets désirables
>Amit Zoran, MIT - Fabrication personelle: qu'est-ce que cela veut dire? quels sont les enjeux?

Session 4: "Fab Labs" : l'innovation industrielle ouverte à tous ?

>Adrian Bowyer, University of Bath - RepRap: vers la fabrication personnelle et open-source : http://reprap.org
>Ton Zijlstra - Qu'est-ce qu'un fab lab? Qu'est-ce qui en sort? Que faut-il pour avoir un fab lab?
>Haakon Karlse, Fablab Norway - The global Fab Labs network

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WEB SQUARED, MAKING SENSE OF THE WORLD THROUGH SHARED DATA

Session 1: The New Science of Data

>Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Indian Prime Minister - What can Indian innovation tell and teach the world?
>Yan Moullier Boutang, - How can we create and share knowledge out of the masses of data we collect on the world?
>Fabien Girardin, urban data researcher - From mobile data to visualizations of urban activity
>Jan Blom, Nokia research center - How can mobile phone users be more than sensors for data analysts?

Session 2: Open Public Data, a New Resource for Innovation and Participation

>Jarmo Eskelinen - Open public data: the finnish example, apps for democracy
>Michael Cross, The Guardian - How can open public data become reality? The "Free our data" initiative
>Hugues Aubin - Open public data and public transports in Rennes

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"FAB LABS", REINVENTING INDUSTRY

Session 3: Future things, future design process and challenges

>Matt Cottam, CEO Tellart - New material for physical computing and independent manufacture
>JL Fréchin & U Petrevski - Hacking industrial machinery to design desirable objects
>Amit Zoran, MIT - Personal fabrication: what does it mean? What are the opportunities?

Session 4: What If Anyone Could Make Almost Anything ?

>Adrian Bowyer, University of Bath - The RepRap: Towards open-source personal manufacturing?
>Ton Zijlstra, FabLab Foundation Netherlands - What does it take to BE a fab lab?
>Haakon Karlse, Fablab Norway - The global Fab Labs network

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"PEOPLE HACK", DISTRIBUTING CONTROL AND KNOWLEDGE

Session 5: Designing for implications

>Anab Jain, founder Superflux - Designing for 'implications': prototyping near future worlds with emerging technologies

Two of the startups presenting their products inside the Alp ICT Venture Corner are offering a cool way to follow Lift:

Sobees

Sobees mixes pictures and news from our official twitter account and from other sources. See the application in action on lift10.sobees.com.

Paper.li

Paper.li presents information fetched from Twitter in a daily newspaper format. See it in action on paper.li/tag/lift10.

Yesterday, after another discussion with a friend who was arguing that "Twitter is futile", I decided to see for myself and start a "Twitter super week". Let's see if sending more updates and sharing more about the conference preparation helps increase the event's impact and exposure.

I give myself a one week time frame, and as I start this we have 967 followers on @liftconference and 245 on @lift (both accounts are mirrored). Twitter experts, your opinion is welcome on how we could maximize the effects of this operation!

I've just posted about my first experiences using Twitter http://tinyurl.com/2vgdwl