Pour de nombreux lecteurs, la découverte du manga s’est faite avec Akira. Å’uvre phénomène dans les années 80 et 90, cette bande dessinée et le film d’animation qui en a été tiré ont vite propulsé le créateur Katsuhiro Otomo comme un auteur culte dans le monde entier. Sous le titre Anthology, les éditions Kana publient aujourd’hui dans leur label Sensei des histoires courtes signées du maître. Après Akira en version couleur ou noir et blanc et Dômu, c’est un nouveau pan de l’Å“uvre de ce mangaka qui devient accessible pour les lecteurs francophones.

Dans ce volume de 260 pages, des récits vieux d’une trentaine d’années sont compilés. Très divers dans leur format, les scénarios proposés ici vont de la science-fiction au moyenâgeux en passant par l’absurde. Souvent drôles, les pages se révèlent d’une étonnante modernité dans le trait. Des séquences sont également mises en couleur et bénéficient de quelques effets spéciaux, ce qui vaut au livre de dégager une très forte odeur d’encre.

Sans être indispensable, Anthology est un recueil recommandable, bien loin des premiers travaux gauches ou non-aboutis. Doté d’un humour étonnant et rendant hommage à ses influences les plus patentes comme Moebius et la culture rock, Otomo boucle l’album avec des commentaires pertinents sur chaque histoire. Pour 18 euros, les fans d’univers post-apocalyptiques et d’humour potache y trouveront leur compte, un grand écart anthologique !

Le premier tour du vote des militants socialistes, qui désignent actuellement leur nouveau premier secrétaire, n’a pas permis de départager Ségolène Royal (43,1%) et Martine Aubry (34,5%). Benoît Hamon (22,83%) est éliminé et appelle à voter Martine Aubry. Un second tour aura donc lieu aujourd’hui.

Lire sur le Monde.fr : Un second tour Royal-Aubry pour la tête du PS

Fred / A VC:
Getting A Piece Of My Action  —  In the past week, I've had two different discussions with readers of this blog who wanted in on one of our deals.  One reader wanted to invest in Twitter, the other in Boxee.  I told them both it wasn't possible.  There are all sorts of reasons why it's not possible …

Don Reisinger / The Digital Home:
Is Apple scared of RIM?  —  Is it a coincidence that Apple's iPhone 2.2 update was released on the same day the BlackBerry Storm hit stores with a touch screen, 3G connectivity, and enterprise-friendly functionality that rivals anything Apple has on the market?  —  I think not.

Got this via the website’s mail form:

Hi, Sorry to bother you, I was wondering if you would be able to help me. I play an online MMO Dungeons & Dragons Online and a program called windows packet editor recently came to my attention I was wondering if you’d be able to spare a few moments to give me a better understanding of WPE and how it can be used to *ahem* alter packets of data so I might be able to say duplicate items or alter certain in game values in DDO. Kindest regards, [name redacted]

Sure, here’s the answer:

No.

The reasons:

• Unless there are egregiously bad security problems with the DDO protocol, hacking packets on your end should only change the way things look on your end. See my previous post “How to hack an MMO.”
• Virtual world developers do not actively help destroy the virtual worlds of their colleagues.
• 

For new bloggers looking to build up their reader base, it's not always enough just to write well; you need to advertise, to get the word out. And what better way to advertise than with ads? Unfortunately, most advertising online still leaves much to be desired, both for advertisers trying to get noticed and for host sites trying to earn some cash. Many of the problems can be traced back to ads' sole reliance on "click-through" -- the theory that a host website should receive payment based on the number of visitors that actually click on the ads. But what other alternatives exist to this pervasive ad model? Where can bloggers go to find something better?

Click-through ads remain the most familiar form of Internet advertising to most websurfers. Most ad services, including Google's AdSense, still operate primarily on this model. Unfortunately, the click is plagued by the potential for fraud, as some site owners resort to multi-clicking their own ads or setting up bots to do so for them. (You can see Google has tried to address in its terms of service agreement, which, for example, admonishes site owners against directing readers to click on the ads.)

Click-through ads also tend to be annoying for site owners. The desperation to catch the reader's eye and entice him or her to click an ad has led to the proliferation of flashy but nonsensical ads -- including display ads with an annoying dancing alien and about a million permutations of the "Punch the Monkey and win a free (blank)" mini-game. There's also the fact that most click-through ads aren't specific to the site where they appear -- they're usually generic banners that will pop up on a site based on an algorithm that looks at key words. This can be especially frustrating to bloggers, who often write about set topics only to have their sites cluttered with unrelated ads.

"There's an industrywide discussion about the value of the click -- both how we're recording clicks and how successful it is," said Matt DiPietro, Marketing Manager for FM Publishing, one of several ad services pioneering alternatives to the click. "It's essentially the way that marketers have been trained to think of the market online, but it's something that's evolving as we speak."

If advertisers want to attract customers and bloggers want to make some money, it would behoove both sides to look for something beyond the click-through. But what else is there? At least a few companies have come up with some ideas.

One of the newer advertising services available is Project Wonderful, which throws out the click-through method entirely. Ryan North, the cartoonist behind the popular webcomic Dinosaur Comics , first created Project Wonderful out of frustration in dealing with traditional click-through advertising, instead replacing it with a system that sells ads based on "air-time."

"You can't hack time unless you've got a time machine, and if you've got a time machine you've hopefully got better things to do than defraud internet companies!" said North, "And around that idea we've build this really responsive auction system, where you can say "I want my ad to be on this site right away", and boom, it's up. And then ten days (or ten seconds!) later you can say "You know what, I'd rather have it on this site instead", and you can cancel your existing bid and you're only charged for the time your site is up."

North said that he designed Project Wonderful to be as fair and transparent as possible, tracking traffic statistics, including hits, referrers, and country of origin for thirty days. It works on a bidding system that he calls the infinite auction. Essentially, a participating webmaster designates a set number of ad spaces on his or her page, and advertisers bid to have their ads posted in those slots. The more advertisers bidding, the higher the price goes and the more money earned for the webmaster. When nobody's bidding, the price of ads returns to zero. (Participating blogs are allowed to set their own starting prices, but are encouraged to let the marketplace set it for them.)

"The main advantages are responsiveness, value, and transparency," North told me. "Our system is fine-grained enough that you can have your ad on a specific spot on a specific site at a specific time, but broad enough that you can also say 'I want to be on these KINDS of sites' instead, and not have to micromanage...I think we've built the only advertising network where it's not a chore, where you have this fun atmosphere and a little competition going on between advertisers and publishers. On top of that, our commission is only 25%, which means we give more money to our publishers than elsewhere, and for advertisers, our prices are really fair and reasonable."

The auction system means that, when starting out, many sites essentially give away ad space for free. It's a good deal for advertisers, as it means that they will always get the best possible price. And so far, Project Wonderful is a buyer's market. Blogger Splitbrain was disappointed to find he'd only earned 8 cents after 4 days of hosting ads through Project Wonderful. Meanwhile, Penn State Finance student Jim blogging at The Net Fool praised the system as a good way for the blogger on a budget to drum up traffic, comparing it to what would happen if "AdSense and eBay got into a bad car wreck."

Currently, some blogs and websites with more-established readerships are able to sell a single ad for as much as $70 a day, but, for most sites, ads range from only a few cents to $10. The system seems to have caught on with webcomics, art sites, and related blogs. As of this writing, a small frontpage Project Wonderful ad on comics blog The Comics Curmudgeon goes for 70 cents a day, while an ad on North's Dinosaur Comics goes for $1.90.

For now at least, the real value of Project Wonderful to blogs might not be as a money-making tool so much as a way to get affordable publicity. With over 8000 participating sites, the system is good for a beginning blogger trying to get word out to the most sites for the lowest price. Even some participants who might not earn a lot of money said that offering cheap ads for sale on their sites is a good way to attract notice - and hopefully eventually build up a reader base. This may be due to one unique aspect of the system which allows it to function as a quasi-socializing network: Money earned through ads can be used to purchase ads on other sites, blurring the distinction between advertisers and hosts. North said:


bq. I love it because, as a publisher, I'm making this money that I can take out at any time, but I can also spend it right away on advertising my own site. And when I do that, it increases the profile of my site and can then even increase the amount of money I'm making for advertising! So that's fun and really convenient, but there's also this social thing you mentioned. That can take the form of "You bid on my site so I'll bid on yours as a thank you at the end," or things like "You bid on my site and I checked out your site and it's really great and I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know!"

Project Wonderful really taught me the value of an endorsement. When we launched, I didn't do any press for it at all -- I just signed myself up as the first publisher, put the ads up on Dinosaur Comics, and let the network sell itself. It's why we took off in webcomics so quickly: people saw it there and beneath our ad boxes is a message saying "Your ad could be here, right now, for just $3.00" or whatever the going rate is. That got a lot of interest from both advertisers and publishers, and the network sort of spread virally throughout that community, which was really gratifying. It was nice to see that something I built to be helpful was actually being used in that way, and that people were getting value from it. That's the best thing you can ask as a developer!

One advantage of Project Wonderful, from a small blogger's point of view, is that it's open to the public. Other alternative advertising systems may be more selective, preferring to foster a small network of high-priced blogs rather than a large one of cheap deals. That's the case with Blogads, one of the early innovators in blog advertising. Founded in 2002 by Henry Copeland as a network catering to political blogs, it has in recent years expanded into a wide-ranging network that includes some of the most high-profile blogs on the Internet, including Perezhilton.com , Cute Overload, and Failblog .

For bloggers, entry to the system is by invitation only. But once accepted into the network, it also does away with counting click-throughs as bloggers get to set their own ad rates. "Bloggers set their own prices for a period of time -- one week, two weeks, one month, three months," said Blogads CEO Copeland. "This method emphasizes the audience's quality and branding versus the very transactional basis."

Copeland said that advertisers working through Blogads can be sure they'll reach a very specific audience. Speaking via email, he differentiated Blogads from other ad systems, like Google Adsense, noting that Blogads could be "purchased on specific blogs or groups of blogs."

As opposed to algorithm-generated click-through ads, advertisers using Blogads know exactly where their ads will appear. That makes the system ideal, Copeland said, for "an advertiser looking to make a mark with early adopters, opinion-makers and taste influencers. This could be a new brand or service, an emerging politician, a new movie or book, or a cause." Copeland said:

Blog readers are responding to individual writer's unedited voices, so their loyalty tends to be much more intense than that of readers of corporate publications. People obviously consume information in lots of forms. We listen to the radio alone in the car. We watch TV with our families. We read the newspaper alone on the subway. Each blog has its own distinct personality and community feel. We read blogs as a participant in a community. It's like being in a movie theater, versus at home alone... we're interested in how other people react as much as in our own reaction. So this makes advertising on individual blogs, or groups of individual blogs, really distinct.

In keeping with its focus on a more savvy audience, Blogads also emphasizes the aesthetics of ad design with clear, focused ads that play on blog readers' love of words. A section on Great Blogads featuring examples of some of the most successful, innovative blogads and commentary on what made them work, including the campaign for the 2006 Audi A3 presented as an ongoing mystery story with clues in different ads.

Since Blogads works with many of the most popular blogs, advertising prices can be pretty high. The number one ad spot on I Can Has Cheezeburger , your first stop for funny cat photos with Internet pidjin captions, costs $1,800 for a single week. The price may be steep for a smaller advertiser, but consider that Blogads estimates a top-placed ad will garner 11,909,512 views in that time.