I will regularly discuss the various innovations Pearltrees users bring to the community: I expect them to surprise us a lot, to find new ways of using the tools, to trigger the development of new key functionalities, and of course to disappoint us sometimes… In one word to make Pearltrees platform their very own place and Pearltrees vision their very own project.

For now on, three main usages are emerging, which structure day-to-day life in Pearltrees:

1- Using Pearltrees to organize one’s Web.

Users collect new content while navigating. They progressively build their maps, modify them, group and ungroup then to retrieve their contents of interest. Is it still bookmarking? Probably much more than this: by building content maps and putting then in other maps, users deal with much more contents than in traditional bookmarking services. In few weeks, some users put thousands of pages in their account while still making the maps understandable. With Pearltrees, a content is no more a carefully picked website : it is an element of a broader story.

2- Using Pearltrees to communicate.

Becoming a communication tool is one of Pearltrees’ core objectives, and many users have indeed began to use Pearltrees’ maps to communicate. Thanks to their maps, they guide their friends or readers through the Web, support their points, report and summarize discussions… They progressively demonstrate the power of maps to broadcast simple and complex stories, thus truly becoming a Web editor community.

3- Using Pearltrees to discover new horizons on the Web.

This is the less obvious and maybe the less widespread of the three main usage yet. As the collective map of Pearltrees, it may nonetheless become the most powerful. Certain parts of Pearltrees are already dense enough, so users can jump from their maps to other interesting maps that cross then, find interesting contents, and continue to jump from map to other maps, either discovering more on the same topic or finding related but completely different themes. They are navigating the interest graph which is the very nature of Pearltrees.

Something else? Well you may have notice a few stuffs on the right column. It is now possible to embedd your maps on a site or a blog. You just need to clik on the pearl to see and navigate those maps. You just need to use the “share” tab of a pearl’s window to get the embedd code and export your Web on your blog or website….

… and a first step toward living maps as a fully open communication format.

For sure, it is only a first step toward the large community of Web editors I was trying to describe in the last post. It is only a first step, but in my opinion, it is truly a step.

A couple of hundreds users are now building their own Web. It can be a funny, usefull or thoughtfull Web, about the present or about the past. It just looks like those who are building it: their tastes, their values and their striking diversity.

I will often discuss the large living map made of each individual map in the future: both its meaning and the way it may contribute to the Web. However, since pearltrees has just opened, since it is now there, ready to be used, I will first talk about its immediate benefit for you: I mean a pionnering pearltrees user.

There are 3 things you might immediately get in pearltrees:

1- Organize the map of your Web.

By using peartrees’ plugin, you will turn your navigations into content maps. Drawing a map enable you to store and find back much more content than traditional bookmarks, to organize them much quicker (you don’t need to tag them, just to put them in the order you like) and to use them much more intuitively. When you want to know where you are in real life you use rather a map than a list. Your mind work just the same way on-line. That’s the reason why pealrtrees will help you organize your web much more efficiently than bookmarks.

2- Guide your friends and readers through your Web.

By sharing your maps with your friends or your site audience, you will guide them through your Web navigations. Do you want to relate a discussion across blogs, comments and news-sites? Do you want to tell what happened, who answered what to who? Do you want to prepare a trip, to tell where you will go, what you will see, how to buy tickets in order to help a friend to come with you? Do you want to lead someone to a series of funny videos or through breaking news events? You can do all this just by sending a content map and letting people play this map.

3- Let yourself be guided through the Web

By playing the map of other pearltrees’ users, you will browse the Web in an entirely different way : not randomly, not through search engines, but by following a path organized by someone. You will discover the Web as if this someone was guiding you. It will not be the average someone actually, rather someone who know it, someone who has something to tell about it, or just someone who will likes it. By going from guide to guide, from map to map, you will discover an entirely new, humanly edited Web…

… An edited web I can only invite you to contribute to!

Pearltrees wants to build the participative community of web editors.

Why such a community? Because the number of contents available on the web goes far beyond the edition capability of any individual. Only a large community would be able to manage them properly.

Why participative ? Because we want to move from content aggregation to content edition. An aggregation is never as meaninful as a real edition: it dilutes the specific value of the individual voices. Participation  means much more than vote, or bookmark, it means giving a specific meaning, that may be discussed but not averaged by other participations.

Moreover, why should we work on a specific project? Why not to continue to use the existing platforms? Wont’ they already help us to be editors? Why should one single initiative gather an almost- infinite number of points of view?

To answer these questions is key.

They are two complementary dimensions in social medias: the diversity of contributions on the one hand, and the uniformity of formats on the other hand.

Wikipedia was born from the diversity of wikipedians but would not exit if not vehiculated inside the same wiki format. Youtube has an extreme variety of video contents but a single downloading and sharing process. Bloggers are all different in the way they contribute to the blogosphere, but they are all using very similar platforms and discussion rules.

There is a real taste for editing the web today. We all know blog posts only made of links to other post, twiterers that mainly retwitt, or link-based plateforms. Those are web editions already!

The only reason why a real open and participative editors community does not exist yet is the lack of a common editor format.

The ambition of Pearltrees is simply to provide this common format.

Search engines and major portals still guide and direct users - rather than Web users themselves. Social bookmarking sites and other voting systems do not resolve this issue. By aggregating individual views rather than extracting specificities, they produce the same kind of results as the search engines.

This imbalance between democratic content creation and centralized access to content poses one of the main barriers to the development of the Web. It has two parallel effects:

-        As spectators, Web users cannot find their way through the mass of content that is of interest to them

-        As creators, Web users are obliged to engage in disseminating and referencing activities, far removed from their real interests, if they want to attract the audience their content deserves.

In practice, therefore, the Web’s democratization potential remains unfulfilled.

There is one missing link to a fully participative Web: user’s ability to guide and direct other users through their own Web.

1 - Media where discussion was driven by a project. They are basically the organizations, such as schools, churches, armies, political institutions …

2 - Media where discussion was driven by a small group of people. They are the hierarchical medias which have appeared since the print revolution: printed books, newspapers, cinema, radio, televisions, …

3 - Media where discussion was driven by the community of users : the internet, social medias, web-based social apps…

The first category has always been there. The second grew a couple of centuries ago. The third exists for decades at best. If the development of radicaly new media types was continuing at this pace, wouldn’t we be close to a new media revolution?

Thanks to Barberousse

Memory and forget both fuel the discussion process. One could not build on other’s arguments without a memory of them.  At the same time, discussions would not progress if everyone kept in mind only the mass of past arguments that brought out the new ones.

This is maybe the reason why social medias and the current Web discussion tools are now placing such an emphasys on forget rather than memory. Blogging draw a lot of its value from the way new contents replace older ones. Twitter and friendfeed could be rightly labelled as “forget machines”. The wikis themselves, while aggregating the writings of the past, end up by totaly replacing them.

Due to this emphasis on forget, the Web has become a world of authors with almost no memory. Old contents are often not being deleted, but very few people have the intention and the capabilities to pick them up, give them a meaning or place them into broader picture

If the Web has an immense abilities to forget its own contents, what it needs now is a living memory content organizer.

So much thanks to Barberousse for his help in bringing back this old post to life

Cratyle.net’s initial purpose was to publish random ideas on the Web evolution and needs. In few month, those random thought became much more focused than I would have guess…

Discussions around social media, user generated content and web “democratization” generated very precise ideas about the need for editing the Web. Those ideas became a social media concep, the concept gathered a small group of highly talented friends, and the friends founded a startup : pearltrees. It is now in private alpha and will open its doors in the coming weeks.

In the english version of this blog, I will certainly deal with pearltrees, its meaning, use and development - after all, pearltrees is a direct consequence of the discussions which took place here (and very specifically there…). I will also try to broaden the discussion on new media which is this blog’s long lasting theme (and eventually try to post a bit more than my usual once a month… c’est promis).

Welcome on a broader Cratyle!