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Pour nos chers lecteurs français (12 percent of our audience), L’Atelier is publishing Dominique Piotet and Francis Pisani’s great introduction to Web 2.0 practices free.

“Comment le web change le monde: L’achimie des multitudes” (How the Web is Changing the World: Alchemy of the Multitudes), published by Pearson, describes the change to the participatory Internet, describing the latest web tendencies while interrogating the economic and social theories behind them.

Download available here or at www.alchimiedesmultitudes.atelier.fr

Dominique Piotet is the President and CEO of L’Atelier North America and host of a weekly radio tech watch for the French business station, Radio BFM. Francis Pisani, also based in the Bay Area, covers technology for some of Europe’s largest newspapers, including Le Monde and Spain’s el Pais. His blog Transnets is available in both French and English.

How can you not love a tech book that references Rimbaud in its title?

The Workshop (aka. Atelier) Is Already Two Years

It is now two years that the workshop has been established in the heart of Silicon Valley to monitor the creation and advancement of new technologies and their uses. Thanks to our customers and readers of the website, success is here.

I put together a short video to summarize what the workshop has become.

Welcome to Atelier’s new Web site

Dear Readers,

I am pleased to announce the launch of Atelier’s new website.

Our teams have put forth our best efforts in creating this blog to ensure you an exceptional online experience. The time has come for our Web site to become user-friendly.

This new version is designed to make the site more efficient. You are now able to browse our hundreds of articles more effectively through categories, keywords (tag clouds), and archives.

Additionaly, our homepage includes great new features such as my updates from the micro-blogging site Twitter and my photo updates from pictures and video-sharing site Flickr.

You are also given the opportunity to interact directly with any article that you read. I encourage you to express your opinion, suggestions, and critiques at the end of any article. We value your thoughts!

Do take the time to learn more about Atelier’s business by visiting the three main sections in the main column - Consulting Services, Events, and New Media.

I look forward to receiving your feedback, and wish you a happy reading.

Mathieu Ramage, Editor

New Media

Atelier’s blog provides daily news, analysis and opinions for its clients and for leading experts in the technology and information industries, as well as for its readers.

From trends in financing and in consumer behaviors, to collaborative tools enterprises utilize on the Internet, Atelier’s writers trace the many fluctuations occurring online. Strengthened by local teams in Europe (www.atelier.fr) and in Asia (asie.atelier.fr), they have a profound understanding of the impacts Web technologies and Internet usage have across countries. This lends Atelier’s delivery of brief and in-depth articles authority.

Since 1978, Atelier has analyzed innovations in technology. By the early 1990s, it also began reporting the news on such updates. Thus, its insights and multi-pronged coverage put it at the forefront of technological change while making an impact on both the tech- and media world. Readers mainly located in the United States and in Western Europe, bearing an interest or investment in technology mainly, refer to Atelier’s blog to on a regular basis.

Reading Atelier’s Newsletter helps you stay ahead in and of the emerging technology marketplace.

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Mathieu Ramage
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Inquiries for the web site, such as interviews, tips, press releases, advertising opportunities, etc. should be addressed to editor@atelier-us.com.

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  • alchimie des multitudes illustrationL’Atelier’s very own Dominique Piotet partnered with fellow countryman Francis Pisani to write a book which nicely puts into perspective the biggest Internet trend of the moment. We are all actors on the web and this is changing the world.
    Most of you are inundated with RSS feeds, blog posts and dozens of other news tidbits. You are living and breathing the Internet on a daily, most likely hourly, basis. If you are based in the Bay area, you are probably both using and inventing the Internet. Sometimes it is nice to take a breath and a step back to contemplate the world we live in, especially when it is changing so rapidly it makes your head spin.
    According to Piotet and Pisani, we live in a new world of dynamic relationships where we belong to many small and scattered communities. For most users, technology has become simple enough that it can fade into the background and simply enable communication and sharing to happen unhindered. The biggest revolution, of course, is that one-way, top-down communication is a thing of the past. We no longer simply receive information. We produce information, we publish it, we comment on it, we vote on it and, we act on it. Out of this frantic exchange comes new meaning.
    Piotet and Pisani do not entirely subscribe to the concept of the "wisdom of the crowds". However, far from agreeing with the detractors of the Internet who like to jeer about the "stupidity of the crowds", the authors point out that many exchanges do not enrich the general conversation. But given a choice, they would choose this new world of great possibilities any day. They have chosen to invent a new term which is also the title of their book. They prefer to talk about the "alchemy of the multitudes".
    Alchemy because pooling many minds together can sometimes create gold, though not always. Multitudes because, according to them, it better captures the fact we are many, unrelated entities with different interests. Another expression they are fond of is "webactors." They prefer this term to the accepted French "internautes" which describes people who utilize the Internet because we are no longer passive users, but active participants.
    For French readers, the relevance of the book partly lies in the fact that both authors are embedded in the Silicon Valley, having both lived and worked there for a number of years. While the analysis provided by Piotet and Pisani is interesting, so are the interviews with some famous and less famous local thinkers including Tim O’Reilly, Danah Boyd from UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and Office 2.0 founder Ismael Ghalimi. For English-speaking readers who will hopefully get a chance to read the book in English soon, part of the interest might be in the fact that the authors are outside observers with a different set of references than the natives.
    Describing the state of affairs using many examples is one thing and a very useful one, particularly for their French readers who might not be as close to the cutting-edge Silicon Valley. But Piotet and Pisani also want to explain the implications both for us as individuals and for companies. An immediate challenge is to find a suitable economic model to reward users who now co-produce content. Another particularly demanding situation is that of the traditional news media which have lost their former authority as readers have become news commentators and producers. On a different level, companies will soon exist "in the clouds". But how soon will this happen and after reaching which technological and cultural compromises?
    The authors would have liked to publish their book online, but the publisher would not go for it. For now, you can get a taste (in French) at .

    By Isabelle Boucq

    Comment le web change le monde : L’alchimie des multitudes, Francis Pisani and Dominique Piotet (Pearson, 2008).

    chinese_internet_research_conferenceAtelier was at the Chinese Internet Research Conference (www.circ.asia) held in Beijing from September 21–24, 2006. The annual meeting, which brings together China’s Internet players, is a must for getting a sense of new Web trends in China.

    Established leaders include Tencent based in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Tencent is a “company on the rise.” According to Alexa, it recently became China’s number two site, a nose ahead of Sina but still trailing Baidu. Tencent’s first success was becoming a favorite of young cybernauts, particularly with the triumph of its number-one instant messaging software QQ (that has outpaced MSN Messenger, which ranks second).

    Continue Reading »

    china_letterDespite constant media attention surrounding the Internet in China, people still know very little about this new Internet frontier. Hardly anyone can tick off the names of dotcoms that are a part of daily life for Chinese Internet users.

    We know all about using MSN Messenger to chat with friends, Amazon.com to buy a book, and eBay to sell a vintage collection of Rolling Stones LPs. Not so in China.

    Exit MSN Messenger. The young (typically urban) Chinese Internet community uses QQ to chat online and goes to Joyo.com (recently acquired by Amazon.com) or DangDang Bookstore Online to by the latest Harry Potter book in Chinese. For online buying and selling, Shanghai and Beijing websurfers log into TaoBao.com, the country’s leading online auction site with over 10 millions users—20 times more than are registered with its competitor eBay China.

    Continue Reading »