Conceptual internationalization

21/05/2015 15:29 Rangé dans:Cultural aspects

Free expression

If the protection of our moral and financial rights forces us, as web authors, to lock our user environment around its native core, and to remain vigilant with regard to the social networks for how intrusive they can get, how are we supposed to optimize our networking practices for greater visibility? Let us solve this perfect prisoner’s dilemma by walking through the present debriefing of my pre-audit for the years 2013 to 2015, from the general perspective of the watchful internet user seeking to preserve both his·her privacy and vital space without neglecting his·her freedom of expression, and therefore aiming at assessing his·her optimization potential with a view to a future affiliation with my NetPlusUltra®-sustained master franchising system.

To avoid the pitfalls of bad preparation, start with a comprehensive checkup of your own motivations, by framing your activities into an optimization matrix pertaining to your administrative, personal, social, and professional "time squares", as shown on slide n°1/6 (1). In a second step, set out to create your own project Mailfolio®, by taking a closer look at the webmail solution provided by your ISP, in order to complete the latter with whatever options might be missing (such as aliases, anti-spam, anti-virus, encryption, secure SSL connection, blacklisting, etc.). To do so, please refer to slide n°2/6 (1), and find a website dedicated to best email practices, such as our French https://www.arobase.org (2), which, though improvable in favor of the native approach, still constitutes a good starting point on the networking fundamentals of emailing (3). As you can see, though the final step of publication is still far off, the individual array of possibilities in terms of sharing content across personal, social and professional boundaries is already large enough.

Let us now enlarge our vision to encompass the perimeter pertaining to group discussions, which raises the question of how to present such a forum to a specific target audience, since there is no point these days in showing off on the radar of occultism. Whether you decide to create a group for personal reasons (to discuss genealogy with family members, or to comment on the latest movies with friends), or in a professional capacity (to open a reassuring FAQ Board for undecided prospects), the most accessible and complete solution from a conceptual standpoint is undeniably Yahoo Groups (4), considering that it provides a (recommended) private group status which is contractually respectful of our European approach of intellectual property, and - as such - compatible with the NetPlusUltra®-focused vision of quality circles. For restricted or public groups (which I do not recommend, since the latter are open to unsolicited messages), the group description page still holds enough space for a comprehensive presentation of the group’s purpose, whether the latter has an official website or not, whereas private group settings even enable the owner to reserve access through a dedicated web form with additional specific terms of use (5), which works if those dispositions serve to complete Yahoo’s general terms of use instead of contradicting them.

At this point, I am assuming that the preparation of your project Mailfolio® and the creation of a Yahoo Group have made you more self-confident, and that you are looking forward to taking an active part in the publication effort. Don’t overestimate yourself, and take the time to review the many hosting solutions available, from featherweight to heavyweight, whereby the weight measure refers to the amount of information that you can afford to entrust to these various platforms, depending on their reliability, and on the control they can give you, provided you declare yourself willing to assume the responsibilities that come with self-authoring. If you are still undecided with regard to what you intend to publish, consider these various solutions as successive steps of the same publication path (6), and progress to the next level as you see fit. If on the other hand, you are driven by a specific idea with clearly defined needs, I can only advise you to cut to the chase and to subscribe directly with the provider whose offer meets your demand.

Let us start with the featherweight category of this virtual ring (7), which is that of (those who can’t compete…just kidding!) the social networks, and the latter's annoying contractual tendency to turn the user into their cash cow. It cannot be repeated often enough: no one is expected to self-inflict such an ordeal! To avoid getting black-holed, register with European platforms such as Qwant or Glowbl to set up your Boards (8) and LiveStages (9) of free expression, which you can also use as official profile pages to describe your private or restricted discussion groups at Yahoo for example. Before you give it a try, keep in mind that those platforms should be considered as technological showcase forums disguised as social cafeterias (with Big Browser logged right into your brain), which should be used with full awareness of their contractual limitations and are therefore limited to the publication of information pages that you had better create on your hard-drive if you want to reclaim ownership of your content in case you unsubscribe…all of which considerably reduces the benefits of joining. Therein lies the whole problem.

In light of the above, web hosting should seriously be considered as a standalone subject matter area, which raises the question of the right ISP, with a first distinction to be made - in the lightweight category - between internet consumption (during leisure time), as opposed to internet production (during working time). If your motivations drag you into the first, you can declare yourself a socionaut, and the basic cloud-based options included in standard internet service packages (10) should be enough to cover your needs. If on the other hand, you need to create a website to multiply your chances of making a good impression, start with activating the personal pages option included as well, such as SFR’s for example, which is currently (in France) the most presentable in this category. While often perceived as a free of charge service though provided as part of the monthly subscription fee, it is nevertheless worth considering because it leaves you the choice of the web publication mode (hard-drive-based or browser-based [11]), provided you do not baulk at making the necessary installations yourself. Due to its technical limitations, this option should be considered for a personal blog or website, as the name thereof suggests, which is nevertheless necessary and sufficient to make it admissible for affiliation with my NetPlusUltra®-sustained franchising system.

Anyone who is aware of the above pitfalls, and/or who belongs to the generation of today’s knowledge integrators (12) in their forties, who have witnessed the emergence of the internet (13) and anticipated the collateral effects thereof, should settle directly for the middleweight category of shared hosting solutions (14) at a professional web host such as OVH for example, which, in addition to the appropriate modem, also offers a comprehensive catalogue of solutions suitable for long-term projects. Considering further, as a reminder, that 1&1 (15) is the German counterpart of OVH in France, there is no point for French knowledge professionals in getting themselves info-managed in Germany (and vice versa). For an overview of all that can be achieved by subscribing to such a web hosting package, I would like to refer you back to my Metafolio-enabled concept presentation (16) with its multithreaded catch-up feeds (17): as an ongoing feasibility audit report, this publication project was initiated in the lightweight category with Jimdo (18), a German alternative to our French personal pages which is suitable for the creation of a personal blog or website of professional quality, but not hosted in France.

This b®ings us back, in the heavyweight category, and as announced in my NetPlusUltra®-focused mission statement pertaining to the cultural dimension of internationalization (19), to my dedicated Extranet+Ultra®-sustained infrastructure, which will be the multi-OS-enabled equivalent of my native Intranet+Ultra®-based web services (see slide n°4/6 [1]). Although the basic OVH version thereof has already proved its worth as a WordPress-based specifications module (20) waiting to be upgraded into a multisite installation (21), the choice of a fully integrated solution such as IBM Connections (22) justifies itself by the necessity to let all (future) national Extranet+Ultra®-sustained spectroscopies aggregate into their own "proprietary safe", which raises the question of the info-management strategy to be implemented for the distance administration and maintenance of such dedicated servers. Here again, the solution lies in the formula itself, and translates into a "turnkey-delivery" scenario similar to the user experience of purchasing a Mac Mini Server at the Apple Store (23), getting it up and running, and configured for a specific purpose. Depending on the terms of service of the manufacturer (IBM) and the web host (OVH, subsidiary, or third-party provider), and on my own return on experience as a system administrator, the granting of a NetPlusUltra®-certified licence to a (future) franchised member having competence for the maintenance of such a conceptual perimeter is a possible development.

Daniela BERNDT

French / German

Dashfolio 2015
The Year of Blogging Convergently

Conceptual internationalization

Free expression

Daniela BERNDT

Further reading