In a quest to drive website traffic and increase site popularity, marketers and brands are all doing their best to stand out and attract users, and to convince them to visit their websites. This, however, is quite a complicated task, as young kids visiting sites depend totally on their parents to set up the sites for them.

But what happens when you put all the kids websites into one place and create easy navigation for children to surf these sites? What happens when you let the kids decide for themselves what their favorites are, from a big selection?

What happens when the web environment of kids website give a fair chance to make its mark, by letting the kids themselves decide what their most popular websites are, regardless of marketing spending and online efforts.

Websites are added by parents and educators from all over the world. All content that has been recently added is getting exposure. This keeps the content fresh for the kids and give the new content a chance to become popular.

The following list represents the 10 most visited sites by kids from more than 80 countries. Young children have direct access to hundreds of kids websites in more than 30 languages in a safe, central place. These websites are identified by colorful eye-catching thumbnails and children simply need to click on the image of their choice to visit the site. Children can also easily add any website to their favorites section for fast and easy return to the sites that they like the most.

And the winners are??? Winnie the pooh? PowerRangers ? … Times change, also in the children world !

 You’ll notice that for Fun Brain and Poisson Rouge: these two sites use learning games and activities to educate children. The popularity of these sites could be indicative of the demand by children for educational and interactive website content.

So Winnie … you know what you should do now !

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Valérie.

Cécile

Yesterday, a single creator produced a work of art, today thanks to the network many people can create together. Collective works of art are in vogue. The artist is a guide for the surfers who are taking part to his creation. He coordinates their participation.

Of course, the access to technology doesn’t make anyone become an artist. But, the gap between people and the artistic creation decreases inch by inch. The frontier between who is an artist and who is not becomes unclear.

Véronique Aubouy, director of fiction and documentary, imagined the project « Le Baiser de la matrice ». On her website, Lebaiserdelamatrice.fr, she invites the visitors to film themselves by reading a page of Marcel Proust‘s book, A la recherche du temps perdu. In her mind, the process is more interesting than the result. Today, 114 hours of reading have been recorded, that’s to say 2160 pages and 63% of Proust’s work.

Though, the copyright could be a serious problem for such a creation! But the solution was found at the end of the 90’s with the Creative Commons.

With the online produced works of art, the artist reverts back to what he was before the Renaissance: an unknown. Now, the capacity to share is what does really matter.

Oriane

Mon catcheur, ce héros

From brawl to fantasy

And perhaps been wrong! For to see how Prince Zefy, world wrestling champion, fucks a jerked to a gothic platform shoes. He is ready to “destroy” to “dive and squashing like a filthy slug” all young people who take a Hasbeens.

Pure anthology when two French 70s wrestlers, struggling bare breasts. One  in a green jersey pins biting the nipples of his opponent caught in the ropes. Jaqui in the public, beret and cigarette glued to his lips, is delighted. We too!

Fight like in real life

But the catch is now more than that. The fourth character of this webdocu Divine Isabella, an entrepreneur whose real profession, attests.

Wrestling is not only a show . Mr Jacky, now coach and referee, is ready to get angry for one understands. During his career he got hurt, and clearly, he hates people who say that their sport is cinema!

A geeks sport’s

 What is harmless and makes feel good is to watch this webdocu made by karim el Hajj that I had already mentioned in my previous article “4 weeks for dusting the Louvre”. In addition there are to sociological and historical explanations of the sport that is still dreaming boys.

For as the saying very serious sports sociologist Christopher Lamoureux: if young people still love wrestling, it’s because “it’s too much”!

Vincent

To start 2010, I propose to answer to an important question for people looking for music on the Internet : today, what are the best musical websites ?
I’ve selected for you three amazing websites where you can find a lot of music and discover new artists, easily and for free!

1.    Spotify.com

spotify.com

Launched in 2008, Spotify is a swedish digital music service that gives you access to billions of songs by two different ways :

-    a free way : you have to obtain an invitation to open an account and download Spotify. When the application is installed on your computer, with Windows or Mac OS, you can listen to music when you want, and find your favorite songs in the amazing musical catalog of Spotify. The access is unlimited and unrestricted. The application looks like Itunes and is very simple to use. Spotify has a very pleasant and clear interface in black and green. With Spotify, you can also create your own playlists and share them with your friends. With the free version, the only drawback is the add of advertisements between two tracks (every 7 or 8 minutes) but, actually, it is not very impeding.

-    a premium offer which costs to the suscriber 9,99 euros per month : the main advantages of this version is to listen to music without advertising and to be allowed to invite your friends and family to join Spotify, and to use the Spotify Iphone application (an it is a very important advantage !).

To conclude, according to me, Spotify is the best free digital music interface ever. It is a real music player very competitive and highly recommended to all music lovers !

2.    Fairtilizer.com

fairtilizer.com

Fairtilizer is the « Do It Yourself Music Club ». With this digital plateform, you can create your playlists from tunes of the Fairtilizer music catalog and publish them on your websites, blogs and social networks. With a simple invitation available with an e-mail address, you can create your profil and access to a large musical library where artists and records companies share their tunes. Fairtilizer is a sort of new Myspace. You can follow some users and your profil can have suscribers, according to a principle of community.

At the beginning, the website has been created for professionals of music industry, but today, a lot of « fans » open accounts too. Fairtilizer is an incredible and efficient way for artists to promote their music.

Therefore, Fairtilizer is a very innovating website which proposes an alternative to the music industry crisis.

3.    Grooveshark.com

Grooveshark.com

An other website to listen to free music online is Grooveshark.com. It is a streaming website such as Deezer, and not a software such as Spotify.

The ergonomics of Grooveshark is the best of all musical websites. It is very easy to create playlists, to personalize the players and export them on your blogs or social networks, and to upload tracks from your computer. Grooveshark.com proposes a lot of widgets and a very efficient and personalized radio service (the « Autoplay »). All these services are available without any invitation : everyone can open an account.

Finally, Grooveshark.com is an excellent way to enjoy music, with a P2P spirit.

With this Top 3, you’ve got now some keys to find music you love just clicking with your mouse on your computer screen !

Cécile

Millions of people around the world were invited the 25th of october to watch the Irish rock band’s performace at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in California via the internet.

Wearing his trademark sunglasses, lead singer Bono said: “Thank you Los Angeles. Thanks to everyone watching on YouTube all over the world – seven continents.”

The band performed classic U2 hits including I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For , One, Sunday bloody sunday.

The concert was available for viewing live in 16 countries including Australia, Brazil, Britain, Ireland, Israel, South Korea and the United States.

Both YouTube and U2 are veterans of live-streaming. In 1997, U2 streamed a Boston show of its Popmart tour on Microsoft’s MSN website, while last year, YouTube hosted YouTube Live, which included performances from Katy Perry and the Black Eyed Peas’ Will.i.am.

YouTube has had an uneasy relationship with the record industry in recent years, with labels arguing that popular social networking and online video sites should pay them more for the right to feature their artists.

At the same time they recognize the importance of maintaining their presence on sites that help shape young fans musical tastes.

                                                                                                                                                                                                             Valerie

Artists, film makers, journalists, and intellectuals tried to reason with the news through the masterpieces of the museum. Among them, the famous semiologist Umberto Eco,

http://louvre.arte.tv/2009/12/les-listes-dumberto/

the artist  Aurèle,

http://louvre.arte.tv/2009/12/mines-antipersonnel-aurele/

or the journalist of Le Monde, Karim El Hadj

http://louvre.arte.tv/2009/12/besson-cantona-louvre/

This trial is part of an overall strategy of the museum. Just before the opening of this website, the cultural institution had launched an iPhone application. If with it, we can find the most famous works from the collection with a cartel explanation, this is not at all the case with “4 weeks”.  Further analysis of work, this creative platform offered an appointment daily basis posts audiovisual creative, an a rich variety of writings. The views of authors who feed on the collections and activities of the Louvre, to tell us about the world as it goes.

If you want to know what a teenager from 9/3 says about the Joconde, or to see a moonwalk danced front of the David’s Serment des Horaces, it’s on http://louvre.arte.tv/

Vincent

On the website www.expositions.bnf.fr you can indeed reach virtual exhibitions. The first advantage is that you don’t have to stand in line during hours to get your entry ticket. The regular visitors of exhibitions in Paris know what I mean. Moreover, you avoid the crowded rooms where you have to puch your way in to catch a sight of something. You can also make the visit at 11:00 in the evening or 6:00 in the morning if your schedule is as crazy as mine. And it works as well for the former exhibitions you missed, still for schedule crazyness reasons. “choses vues choses lues”, “estampes japonaises”, “jeux de princes, jeux de vilains” are on line too.

My first disappointment was that there was no caption to describe the picture and explain them. But after a while I realized that I could click on the picture to make it appear! As a student specialized in online communication, I can’t help noticing that this point should be improved for a better ergonomy…  Nevertheless, the commentaries are very complete and much easier to read than they are on the small signs in the museums. You can even do a quick copy-paste to keep the most interesting!

Of course, you can’t see the manuscripts with your own eyes and you miss the emotion to be in presence with many centuries old objects. Furthermore, the colors and the size differences of the manuscripts are not faithfully translated by the computer’s screen. To finish, it’s far to be so convivial as going to and exhibition with friends.

But if you have no time, like me, to go round the temporary exhibitions, try the virtual visits!

Radiohead

The Radiohead Model : a gift economy in music industry

Where can you find music on the Internet ? To this question, you could answer «everywhere», and first and foremost on a lot of legal or illegal downloading websites. But the Web is not only a support to replace one day the physical CD. Above all, it is a strong communication tool whose artists need to promote their music. It is also a tool with which artists can get round traditional distribution and promotion networks, and create a direct link with their public. Thereby, you can listen to (or download for free) tracks of your favorite artists on the community website Myspace, or on official websites, without going to your records shop ! But some artists have decided to take all the advantages of the Web to invent a new economic model based on the fans networks (built on websites such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter or Last.fm): the gift economy.

The English group Radiohead was a precursor of this new model with the release of his last album «In Rainbows». In early October 2007, and only ten days before the digital release of the album on inrainbows.com, the group created an amazing buzz anouncing that everyone will have the possibility to download «In Rainbows» to a price chosen by the user himself. Thus, the giant of English pop revolutionizes the musical ways of consumption, using his huge fame to free oneself from the records companies and the distribution networks, and to put in his artistic activity a gift economy. By these means, Radiohead gives a new value to the DIY tradition (Do It Yourself).

Moreover, thanks to The Internet, Radiohead has opened new future prospects for the music industry, currently in complete transformation. We can underline that the «In Rainbows» experience was very salutary for the group, not only from a marketing point of view, but also from an economic point of view. In only tree days, 1,3 millions of albums were downloaded, for an average price of 6 dollars per download, even if about 30 % of the Internet users had dowloaded «In Rainbows» without paying anything.

Therefore, this model could interest in the future a lot of bands who want to use The Internet as a real alternative medium to promote and sell their music directly to their public. This gift economic model could also compete against legal downloading websites such as Itunes. Beyong, Radiohead has now opened his own downloading website, included in a full online store where you can buy albums (in digital or physical supports), clothes, books, posters and even a Radiohead water bottle! To visit this brand new store, click here !