We spoke with Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for the Information Society and Media, who provided us with a ample and accurate account of the politics of cooperation and collaboration adopted by the most famous international social networks, from non-profit organizations to the European Commission itself, to protect adolescents and children online and make  the internet a safer place.

After verifying the growing popularity of social networking sites in Europe, which are the main features of this new economic and social phenomenon you focused on and why?

Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media: Social networking is indeed a growing phenomenon. Everybody has heard about Facebook, Daily Motion, StudiVZ, Hyves, Tuenti or Linkedin to name but a few. For the last year only, the use of social networkers has grown 35% in Europe while at the same time 56% of internet surfers visited social networking sites. I believe their open and interactive nature has mostly contributed to the growth of the number of these sites but also to the growth in traffic generated by today’s 41.7 million regular users. The fact that we can create profiles, upload and share pictures and videos, chat with friends, play games, create our own blogs, meet new people from all over the world and digitally ‘hug’ them or ‘buy them a drink’, has added to the popularity of social networking among European citizens – especially the younger generation but also businesses who try to enlarge their professional networks.
Did you know that users in Great Britain spend almost 6 hours on average per month on such sites? More surprising, a Facebook representative recently mentioned that a third of their users consult Facebook five times a day! And now 3 – one of the UK’s mobile operators – have even integrated a Facebook button on their mobile phones so that using the internet on your mobile you will be able to check your account non-stop, wherever you want, even if you are not at your PC or laptop.
This is just to show you that social networking sites have changed the way we keep in touch, look for information and entertain ourselves. But is has also given companies innovative means to manage their human resources, customer service and advertising. These networking websites have turned people into active users of technologies, but we should not forget that these changes there are also new challenges. Their immense popularity among teenagers raises serious concerns related to the protection of data and privacy online. This was one of the topics we discussed at the Safer Internet Forum last September.

Can you explain to us the Safer Internet Forum, its main purposes and how it is related to the social networking environment?

V.R.: The European Commission has been organising the Safer Internet Forum every year since 2004. It provides a European platform where representatives of industry, law enforcement authorities, child welfare organisations and policy makers exchange their experience and knowledge on how to make sure that the internet is safe.
Every year we propose different themes for debate. This year four topics were selected: social networking and children, age verification, research conclusions on children’s use of online technologies and media rating. The 2008 forum gathered around 300 participants from both Europe and other countries such as the US, Australia, Brazil and Korea. For the fist time ever we also invited teenagers to take part in the panel on Social Networking – because after all they are the biggest experts you can get when it comes to social networking sites!

In your speech you stressed the importance of self-regulation, cooperation and participation from the companies of the web 2.0 in order to create a better and safer virtual world for the young internet surfers. Are you satisfied with the companies’ cooperation and involvement in this project, or do you think they can do better?

V.R.: First of all I think that ensuring a safe online environment for our children is a shared responsibility of many actors: social networking sites, parents, teachers, Non-Governmental Organisations and public bodies. The guiding principle here should always be the respect of the individual’s right to privacy.

Being a Christian-democrat from Luxembourg, I normally prefer efficient industry self-regulation over the creation of new legislation. But – and the SMS-roaming-story has proven this right – industry self-regulation can only be an alternative if it is broadly accepted by all relevant stakeholders and when it is effectively implemented. I think it is quite a remarkable and important step that 17 social networking sites which are active in Europe – for instance MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, Hyves, StudiVZ and Skyrock– have agreed to sit together on one table and discuss a common set of guidelines to ensure children’s safety online and improve the transparency of their services. This shows that they are very well aware of their common responsibility of protecting young people who have personal accounts on these websites. I am confident that by February 2009 they will agree on a “code of conduct” which they will then implement and monitor. Fulfilling its usual role as a watchdog, the European Commission will follow this very closely – even on the ’site of crime’ if needed because as you might know many of my fellow Commission colleagues do have social networking accounts.

Self-regulation seems to be one of the keywords of your program about a safer internet. How can the social networking sites improve this aspect in order to give a safer virtual environment to teenage surfers?

V.R.: There are some good examples of social networking sites which provide users with extensive safety tools and information. Many of them have systems for reporting unwanted content and inappropriate or illegal behaviour, like cyberbullying and grooming. Such reports are usually followed by written warnings to the offending users who can have their account suspended or even deleted. Some sites perform pre-screening of the content of chatting and messaging, and a minimal collection of personal information. Some sites offer a type of parental control and put age verification systems in place to prevent under-aged users from accessing the site.
I believe all these measures are a good start for keeping teenagers safe when online. But I would also like to encourage the industry to co-operate with non-profit organisations and other actors engaged in child safety. This will allow us to find the best solution to respond to these challenges while making sure that teenagers continue to fully benefit from the internet and the social networking sites.
I particularly believe that industry needs to work on data privacy in the context of social networking. Social networkers need to remain in control of their personal data, today and in the future.

Can you disclose in advance some of the Safer Internet program guidelines which will be introduced in the next Safer Internet day on February 10,  2009?

V.R.: This is work in progress, so please understand that at this stage, I cannot yet disclose the results of this work. These guidelines will result from joint efforts of representatives of the social networking sites. It is up to them to produce common guidelines which make sure that children are protected online taking into account the opinions of child welfare and consumer organisations. The Commission is acting as facilitator and as honest broker in these talks and will at the end assess whether the results are satisfactory.

Ciaopeople, as a representative of the Italian social networking, from the beginning has been adopting a policy to guarantee Internet and social networking as safer virtual places, particularly for teenagers. Which ways has our country been following in order to protect the younger surfers that are increasingly using the web 2.0?

V.R.: In Italy, the European Safer Internet plus programme co-funds the Italian awareness node EASY (http://www.easy4.it) and the Italian hotline STOP-IT (http://www.stop-it.org). These two raise awareness on the potential risks young people and children may face online, while at the same time, explaining how to deal with such risks. These projects are run by the non-profit organisation Save the Children Italy in partnership with the consumer association Adiconsum.
In addition, Save the Children took the lead and opened a national debate on the issue of online safety. In January and February 2008, a telephone survey was conducted among 300 teenagers asking about their use of instant messaging and participation in online communities and social networks. The results were published in one of the main national newspapers Corriere della Sera on the eve of the Safer Internet Day 2008. On top of this, Save the Children Italy organised on 12 February 2008 a round table gathering the representatives of Italy’s main social networking sites. This provided an opportunity to discuss their responsibilities in assuring a safer use of their services among young people and I hope that this initiative will now be followed by concrete steps. I can only encourage the Italian social networking sites and non-profit organisations to continue to work together and find efficient solutions to deal with online safety issues.

Which directions could the Italian social networking follow independently, but always in respect of our laws, in order to make concrete the younger surfers safeguard?

V.R.: My advice would be that active social networking sites in Europe join the European social networking task force which is working, under an organisational umbrella provided by the European Commission’s, on the future “code of conduct”, to be ready in February 2009. Of course, once drawn up, every social network, including the Italian ones, should sign up to this “code of conduct”. This will give a strong message to surfers that their privacy is being respected which in turn will increase the trust into and therefore the use of social networking sites. I am convinced that the “code of conduct”, which will result from the industry’s combined efforts, will strike the right balance: making social networking flourish even more in Europe, while ensuring the safety of Europe’s youngest (but also older) generation.

Simona Fiore

It is all new, nicer and practical, for sure, but how will our people react?

How will they feel when, after typing in www.qbr.it, onto their browsers, they end up on www.ciaopeople.com? How many of them will be happy about this change, how many will be bothered, and how many will think: “I can’t communicate anymore!”?

We wondered for months, considering the high grade of fidelity that many of our 500.000 young users feel for our Qbr trademark.  We tried to find a way to make this passage less traumatic as possible.  The answer was: let’s  play it down, let’s laugh about it, using their own language, without grand announcements but also without underestimating such an important change.

This way we conceived the idea of a viral campaign realized in two steps.

The first step has just finished.  Starting June 5th, for the whole week before the online launching, Qbr’s users were able to see a few seconds of  video every time they entered www.qbr.it: with a short clip, in Hollywood horror-style, announcing the “end” of Qbr, we informed the community about something important that was about to happen.

The second step has just started.  Now that the passage has occured, ciaopeople.com welcomes its community, not only with a new portal, richer in functions and with a more appealing graphic, but also with an ironic video clip, realized to diminish the possible trauma due to the change and to reassure with a laugh those users who may feel disoriented in the initial phase, puzzled or even angry about the novelty.

Both clips were realized by “The Jackall”, a group of Neapolitan youngsters, popular on the web for their funny videos and parodies of famous movies (like “The Pigeon” or “I am very legend”), in collaboration with Ciaopeople’s staff who decided to also include two “legendary” girls of the community, cassanina and princessa, two of Qbr’s web-stars.  The clip, in parody style, mocks the possible panic users may experience, realizing that their favorite communication means is no longer there.
The boys’ dismay in the first scenes is opposed to the seraphic calm of that one user who, without panicking, keeps on chatting on CiaoPeople as he used to do on Qbr and shows the others the innovations of the new portal.

The viral video, a direct vehicle loved by our target, seemed to us the best way to inform our community that there is nothing to be frightened of, because Qbr has not disappeared but rather it is turning into something better, maintaining  its own basic peculiarities that decreed its success and adding new functions that will make it an even better and richer social network.

Davide Nunziante
Press Office Ciaopeople

Ciaopeople.com keeps the elements of Qbr.it that sealed its success intact, aimed towards the socialization of young people.

Ciaopeople is primarily a chat. Instant messaging is still the core of the social network: the means by which users can enter into contact with each other, chatting, find new friends or new love in a simple but safe environment thanks to the Real User Rank, the algorithm that identifies fake Users and rewards the most active.

“The lightning bolt” mechanism remains unvaried” (which have changed their name to shoks) the much liked system that measures the popularity and approval of users. Our online magazine continues its editorial evolution informing and entertaining every day, with contents that range from news to gossip, thanks to a young , dynamic and well spirited editorial team.

In the transition from  Qbr.it  to Ciaopeople.com, the largest Italian social network, there is a whole new series of sections and features make it an environment with many opportunities for interaction and visibility, ideal for self-expression and new friendships.

The  new portal brings with it a new forum:  Ciaopeople Forum. Divided into themes (which in part reflect the magazine), the forum is a place where the community can discuss various topics and each user can propose discussions and comment.  Uploading of photos and videos has been improved and implemented so that two entire sections are devoted to images and video clips that are uploaded by users of the community: directly from the photos and videogallery of each individual user, a huge archive of photos and videos are divided into searchable categories by tags.

Another novelty is Charts, the section dedicated to Ciaopeople community rankings to which  all members participate through their activities on the site. Users with larger networks, those that receive more visits in their personal space or those receiving more messages or lightning strokes, photos and videos will have greater visibility than the other and so a higher ranking.

But the biggest novelty of Ciaopeople is the Spacelog where each individual user can customize their space with a large number of features that can be changed in a intuitive  and fun way. Spacelog replaces the previous user profile page. What has been created is a multimedia environment that each user can personalize exploiting the full potential of the new portal. In Spacelog, in fact, you can insert an avatar and a small description of yourself, audio files, photos and a videogallery, a potentially infinite network of friends, a blog to write freely and insert images and a profile totally renovated profile enriched with even more information and curiosities.
These are the main novelties of the new portal that includes all the good of Qbr.it  but that is considerably enriched and open to new extraordinary prospects.

Davide Nunziante
Press Office Ciaopeople

October 2007

Not everyone may know that the history of Facebook, originally  “the facebook.com, is closely linked to the founder of Napster: Sean Parker. The fate of the social network, indeed, changed when , soon after the launching of the portal in February 2004, Zuckerberg was contacted by Parker who joined the company,  becoming its President. The two met in New York and collaborated for over a year.
After only a few months Mr. Napster, thanks to his acquaintances, obtained a meeting in San Francisco with the co-founder of PayPal Peter Thiel, who forked out 500 thousand dollars in exchange for 7% of the company. Part of that money (200.000$)  was invested by Parker, who in the meantime had taken the reigns of the marketing department, for the purchase of the “Facebook.com” domain.

Since that first payment it has been all downhill for Facebook with money pouring down over Zuckerberg, despite the breaking off of the partnership with Parker in 2005. In that year, Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, signed a check for 12.7 million dollars,  establishing himself on the Board of Directors, and obtaining soon afterwards other payments from Greylock and Meritech Capital Partners for a total of 27.5 million dollars.

The following table from Tradevibes, the portal specialized in the collection of data related to internet startups, provides a detailed account of Facebook financing.

 What this list clearly shows is that in the United States, when there is a promising idea, venture capital associations invest in  these projects acquiring company shares and providing the companies with liquidity until startup. The obtained funds allow to upgrade which in turn reels in other investors, paving the way to success.

How many opportunities are there for  small Italian companies that operate on the Internet to find investors willing to finance ambitious projects? Very few. If you want to be optimistic.
Too often, companies in the “Belpaese” are not able to impose themselves on the international market because they are forced to be self-financing.

In this regard, during a panel discussion on the issue of sustainability of services and the decline in the advertisement  earnings, at the BlogFest of Riva del Garda, an event dedicated to the Italian blogosphere, Paolo Ainio (founder of Virgilio and Banzai) said:
‘It is necessary to find alternative sources  to support the cost of Internet services. In addition to the problem of the sharp decline in the value of CPM for publishers, in Italy it has always been difficult for small companies with good projects, to finding startup funding.”

How long will  it be until Italian entrepreneurs start to focus on the web? When will investors realize that the Internet has upset the habits of the entire world and that the IT industry is among the most flourishing and expanding? The answers to these questions are not for us to answer but the crisis facing our country today is undoubtedly the effect of  our political leaders who are too old and not particularly in tune with the younger generations. The web is rapidly evolving  and we hope that soon they will notice and  begin to act  to bring out all the promising projects which Italy is  certainly not short of.

Ferdinando Cirillo
Davide Nunziante
Press Office Ciaopeople

The Babelgum Online Film Festival, realized by Babelgum, TV on independent and free internet, is open to professionals and students registered at cinematographic schools all over the world. The categories  are: Short film (20 min), Animation (5 min.), documentary (30 min), and Mini masterpiece (5 min). Also for the second edition , Spike Lee has been reconfirmed as President of the Jury, thus bearing witness to a new more evolved phase of cinema, connected to web 2.0 and to the principles of democracy and sharing that characterize it.

Web 2.0 is gradually assuming a more significant role of alternative channel to grant more visibility to products, contents, forms of art among which cinema, which by following traditional avenues would find it difficult to reach the great majority of the public.

These difficulties are related to economic aspects and to the smash hit logic, where some types of movies are left out because they do not meet the harsh requirements of box office return.

This way,  those who do not have the necessary resources to produce a “ smash hit”, (not always synonym of quality), do not propose plots that are considered successful and can not afford a cast with very famous actors, rarely succeed in making it.

But does the public really only want box office hits?  Web 2.0 has already confirmed for us that the logic behind hits is not always a winning one, that the audience has diverse tastes and preferences which more often than not are not satisfied.

The  Babelgum Online Film Festival represents, then, a phase of cinema evolution, which by opening up to the dynamics of Web 2.0, encourages the encounter between the public and film students or professionals, granting the latter  with a higher degree of visibility and an immediate feedback on their work.

With the  launching of the second edition of  the Babelgum Online Film Festival, Ciaopeople, had an interesting interview with the chief executive officer at Babelgum,  Valerio Zingarelli,  to get a more in depth account of the event.

In one of your latest interview on the second edition of Babelgum Online Film Festival you have underlined a fundamental concept: “The future of the cinema is the web”. Is it possible then to imagine that the cinema will be no more represented by ready-made hits, but by innovative and original products capable to satisfy the long tail of the audience’s tastes?

We don’t believe that the Web 2.0 is going to replace traditional filmmaking, not in the short term, at least. Rather, it will complement it. It will definitely expand the market and create new opportunities in film production and distribution, not to mention the deep impact it will have on the way films are conceived, shot and cut.

We don’t know yet whether the long tail of the audience is going to be satisfied with innovative and original products vs. ready-made hits. What we do know is that the results from the 1st Babelgum Online Film Festival proved that audiences from all over the world were eager for new content; and that independent film-makers were excited to have found a new place to showcase their work.

Of the 1012 films submitted for the first edition, 25% of entries were original content, giving Babelgum users the first chance to view them. At least 60% were conceived for the small screen, indicating a shift in the way the industry is moving and a realisation that to be successful, filmmakers need to go where their potential audience is congregating, whether that means online or even on mobile devices such as laptops or phones. Meanwhile, 19 entries were made solely for the purpose of entering the Babelgum movie contest, in turn proving that the festival generated new film productions.

Babelgum Online Film Festival represents the first important partnership between film art and web with a very successful result. The  user generated content doesn’t only mean “amateur”, but mostly a professional work and  thanks to the Web 2.0 it can easily reach a large audience, hardly obtaining through the traditional media. How do you think this relation can develop in the near future?

The Babelgum Online Film festival is open only to professional filmmakers and film school students and NOT to user generated content. This is to make sure that films submitted to our movie contest maintain a high standard of quality.
Having said that, we do wish to open our arena also to gifted newcomers and filmmakers on a shoestring budget; which is why we decided to introduce the “Mini masterpiece” category in this 2nd edition. This is meant to become a natural port of call for those who have flair for telling bizarre, funny, surprising, provocative, shocking or experimental stories, including viral videos (5 minutes max.).
It’s worth bearing in mind that in the inaugural edition of our festival there was a large component of young and emerging filmmakers, with the average age of entrants being 29. 198 were film school students.

Babelgum Online Film Festival gives talented young men a great opportunity to show their artistic works and projects and, at the same time, it allows the audience to directly vote the movies. In conclusion can we say that it represents the triumph of the web democracy?

Let’s say that the web is a fantastic tool to help make democracy real and effective. Now, there’s a reason why we decided to give so much space and importance to the viewers’ opinions. We believe it’s absurd to reward a film if it hasn’t met with the positive consensus of the general audience. Unfortunately this is what sometimes happens at traditional film festivals: the films awarded then raise little or no interest among the audience when they are theatrically released.

Which is the Italian audience’s answer to Babelgum Online Film Festival? Has it been mature enough to pass from just “spectator” to a more active role?

There was a large proportion of Italians among the 1.5 million Babelgum viewers who took part and had their say on who was to become the next big thing in filmmaking. Just think that around 10% of all the films showcased in the past edition were made by Italian directors and were available in Italian language (with English subtitles). Internet use and broadband penetration might still not be as high as in other first world countries, but Italians are among the most sophisticated and curious web surfers in the world.

After the experience of the first edition whose success has been amazing, for this second edition has  Babelgum Online Film Festival introduced something new or just decided that winning card doesn’t change?

Internet is a work in progress and our festival is no exception. Therefore we decided to narrow down the number of categories and focus on those which proved most popular with the audience as well as most interesting in terms of submissions.

Which are the main characteristics that the talented young men should possess to participate in the Babelgun Film Festival?

Passion, courage, energy, dedication and inventiveness.

Simona Fiore

In the landscape of social networks, the monetization model is currently well-defined, and the main elements are:
• Advertising
• Sponsorship
• Partnership
• Micropayments
• Subscriptions to premium services

Even though the phenomenon of social networks has reached global dimensions, the leading companies in the field, Facebook and Myspace are struggling to reach turnover objectives. In particular, Myspace, has failed to achieve the 1 billion dollar turnover for 2008, although in 2006 it signed a three-year arrangement with Google for a total of 900 million dollars.

Advertising, which is currently the main source of income for almost all social networks, still fails to have a strong enough impact: on average only 0.04% of users click on advertisements. Motivations lie in the fact that the average user of a social network is highly fidelized and rarely attracted by advertising in a world where the purpose is to expand one’s network of relationships. Just think that to date, the best returns in terms of records are obtained through word of mouth and buzz marketing, rather than, for example, the visibility obtained through SEO.

Economic returns below expectations, however, do not remove the big advertisers and sponsors from social networks, since it seems clear that in the near future advertising revenues for traditional media will fall for the benefit of the network of networks. Illuminating, in this regard, were the words of the Australian tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who in 2005 bought Myspace for 580 million dollars. According to Murdoch, the Social Network user database, “self targeted”, thanks to the meticulous construction of profiles, would in the following years become an indispensable asset for the realization of viral marketing campaigns. .

One of the first notions that large corporations are beginning to grasp is that the concept of marketing that made it master in the web 1.0 is not entirely suitable for social networks; portals count on the dynamism of its contents for their success, also need to develop dynamic advertising.

Currently, Facebook has about 150 commercial agreements with companies like Red Bull, Victoria Secrets, Mazda, BMW etc.
One of the most interesting instruments made available to these companies are the “fans page“. The idea of sponsored profile is simple but highly successful as it fully complies with Web 2.0 philosophy. The company appears not as an advertiser, but as a community member with whom you can interact. The results generated by these campaigns are excellent. The CTR is in fact about 10 times higher than average.

One area that will be followed with great interest by social networks, is the virtualization of social objects: products that can catalyse the attention and become a topic of discussion, and that the user can buy for himself or give to other members of the network .
Through micropayment forms, it is possible, for example, to send a virtual cake to a user of the network on his birthday. The Facebook “gifts” turnover was estimated at 15 million dollars annually.

One of the first multinationals to believe in this form of marketing was Heineken, which closed a deal with Facebook that allows users to get a virtual bottle of Premium Light.

Another valid means of monetization for a social network, is to provide its users tools that enable them to develop applications that can be reused on the portal, for example browser games and games of various kinds. The development of applications not only increases the volume of overall traffic in the portal, but it can also be used as a powerful marketing weapon. The development of a successful application where a particular brand appears, certainly grabs the attention of advertisers.

A pioneer in this sector was Facebook with its Graffiti application, and which in collaboration with brands like BMW and Mazda, launched a contest with prizes that gave users the ability to customize the design of certain models of cars.

We at Ciaopeople are moving in this direction, immediately after the official release of version 1.0 of our social network, many will be devoting their energy to the development and distribution of the tools that will enable our users to create applications on the integrated portal.

Programs, variety in content and news, and never failing to remember that the at the heart of Ciaopeople are the users - these are what we believe to be our winning policies.

Social networks are destined to become a sort of “social containers“, macrocomunities where the pivot remains the interaction between users, but where there are also areas dedicated to a new form of entertainment, produced by users for users.

U.S. media claim that one of the reasons for the unexpected victory of Barack Obama in the primary race for the White House can be attributed to the incredible amount of work that the staff of the presidential candidate carried out on the larger Social Networks; the future always runs faster on the network, and when we talk about a sector, one relating to the Internet, that in the last 8 years has seen an increase of 350% world-wide, with peaks of 900% in nations like Brazil, it is to be expected that the future is very near.

Ferdinando Cirillo
Webmarketing Manager

“Giving voice to those who have no voice”, this is the motto of the citizen journalism project which has promoted Global Voices since 2004. Their slogan alone is enough to portray how serious the commitment of the team of bloggers and translators is against global society, it is a complex endeavor  and to try to practice it  every day is a continuing challenge.

Global Voices is one of the most interesting  examples of experimental participatory journalism because it involves marginalized and weaker populations, the reality of which is simply reported, when they really need to be heard, aided, supported and then looked at more closely.

At the same time the project gives an important role to blogs, which while in Italy remain anchored to the idea of “private diary” or “creative work”, in other countries they have become  important tools for disseminating news, for their  capacity to shed light on situations that would otherwise be ignored.

The realities of countries that live under censorship, where freedom of expression is a luxury and where the digital divide is strongly felt, thanks to Global Voices and projects closely related to it , such as Advocacy and Rising Voices, they can finally may emerge and be heard .

Thanks to the work of the team of volunteer translators in the project Language, all news is translated into 15 languages, including most recently also to Italian.

Ciaopeople could not ignore a project so vital in the digital society and with this article wanted to give its small contribution to its promotion and dissemination. Following the official presentation of the Italian version that took place during the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest, I interviewed Eleonora Pantò, translator of the Italian project, coordinated by Bernardo Parrella, reviewing with her the main stages of Global Voices, from its birth in 2004, to today with the  completion of  its Italian localization.
How did the Global Voices project begin?
Global Voices is a ‘non-profit initiative of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, that started  in 2004. The idea of the project, born with the intention of “giving voice to those who have no voice”, was launched by Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Tripod, and Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN correspondent in  China.
Initially, the project provided the translation of articles into English only. Then thanks to Portnoy Zheng, the current coordinator of the Language project, in 2007 it gave a green light to Chinese and other 14 languages which now include Italian.

What are the issues related to economic and cultural conditions of the countries to which it  gives voice that Global Voices has encountered and still deals with?
The problems are diverse and depend on the economic, cultural and political conditions  of the countries in question. These are issues of censorship, freedom of speech, expression, the digital divide, the lack of devices and connections.

How does Global Voices try to address them?
Global Voices addresses these sensitive issues with initiatives that aim to give support to marginalized populations. We have done two projects with twin GV, Advocacy and Rising Voices.
The first is  Advocacy, fighting for freedom of thought, within which we try to train people who write on blogs and enable them to continue the activity of citizen journalism, without incurring with problems with the harsh laws of their countries.
An example is teaching people how to post anonymously, without being recognized, an issue strongly felt in countries like China where censorship is very strong.
The Rising Voices project was born with the intention of bridging the digital divide, by teaching skills to the populations of developing countries and giving them the opportunity to obtain digital citizenship, a key element in becoming a full member to join the global conversation.
Within Rising Voices there are training initiatives on new media and blogs for marginalized populations such as HiperBarrio, implemented in the Colombian city Meddelin, a district with a high crime rate or Foko, made in Madagascar, with the Foko Blog Club, instructs the locals on how to use the average citizen to describe their everyday realities and connect to the global conversation.

What is the relationship between Global Voices, in its quality of citizen journalism and traditional media?
Actually, I do not think there is opposition between the media and Global Voices, partly because many of the bloggers are professional journalists. We try to give voice to news that does not find space on traditional media. Our  aim is to  create a code of ethics of citizen journalism. Journalists have one to follow and it is time that citizen journalists also have rules to respect. One of the main issues that interests us personally concerns the boundaries between public and private entities, that are more often than not, surpassed. This occurred with the massacre of Akihabara, Tokyo last June 8. Public opinion has, in fact, considered the shooting of photos by persons who were not official reporters on the scene, immoral. It is in cases like these that rules need not to exceed certain limits.

During the GV Summit in Budapest the Italian version was officially launched adding it to other 14 languages. Was the intention to keep our country up to date with what is happening in weaker countries or to also bring out the realities of our nation?
The Italian edition was born with a desire to give voice and disseminate news about hidden or ignored cultures of countries with problems of censure, related to freedom of expression, or with a strong digital divide. In line with the Global Voices project which does not address the current news of North America and Western Europe because it is already widely disseminated by major media, initially, our country was not treated.  Recently, however, we did request that Italian news that in some ways has characteristics similar to other realities, be discussed.

On what basis do translators choose the articles that need to be translated?
Topics range from current affairs to social issues to environmental subjects. The translations of articles are at the discretion of the translator and so it is possible that the same article is not translated into all the 15 languages. In this regard we are trying to come up with an  editorial policy.

How is  citizen journalism considered in  Italy?
At the Summit of Budapest we discussed this issue with Alfredo Di Giovampaolo, a professional journalist and blogger (aka SirDrake), who emphasized that “sensitivity in the journalistic field towards citizen journalism is still very low. There are not many journalists that write on the internet, or who have a blog or are part of a social network. Above all, few are those who are questioning how the web and blogs will change the profession of journalist.>>
What is also missing is Internationalization: in Italy  there are still very few blogs that have an English version.
Global Voices is a project that is crucial for the global society because it sheds light on realities that are often hidden or ignored and because it represents an important step in the evolution of how to “make information”. An evolution that depends on the new medium which is the web, but also on an awareness that the journalistic profession is changing, and is increasingly open to internationalization and ready to gather contributions from below.

Simona Fiore
Qbr Magazine Editor

After the access peaks obtained by the magazine and the year of evolution of the entire portal, we are also celebrating half a million subscribers.

A new milestone that confirms the upward trend in social networking scanned at a rate of 100 thousand subscribers every 6 months: in just 2 years we have gone from 100 thousand to 500 thousand registered users.

A chat that was initiated along the streets of Naples, gathering consensus in Neapolitan youngsters and that soon turned into a real social network of national resonance could only prove itself a successful business and an incentive to do even better.

The goal of reaching half a million users is certainly important but today we do not have time for too many celebrations because the entry of a new online platform is upon us. “The transition from 400 thousand to 500 thousand users in less than six months, for us, means having hit yet another target  - says  Gianluca Cozzolino, CEO of Ciaopeople - but today our attention is necessarily focussed on ciaopeole.com.

Our social network is about to change its name and graphics, but above all it is about to include rich new features. And based on the data, speculations are excellent. Qbr.it has proved to be a successful portal, capable of attracting visitors, gaining subscribers and earning the trust of  its young audiences. And with CiaoPeople, it wants to do even more by offering our community a service rich in utilities (still free of charge).

Thus the  CiaoPeople forum will be created, where our young viewers will be able to talk about the wide variety of topics, and entirely new sections are devoted to photo and video, places of pure entertainment, media in perfect 2.0style, and each user will be able to build a spacelog, an innovative and completely customizable space.

All this for our 500 thousand users and for all those to come.

Claudia Saputo

Press Office Ciaopeople

A result that is not achieved only by word of mouth, but thanks to a series of SEO activities aimed at reaching the high peaks of SERP search engines. Working in this regard, in the course of a single year, we have achieved a substantial increase in visits stemming from Google: from 7 thousand to about 60 thousand per day, passing through a fairly high number of keywords (107,802).

In addition to the number of visits and geographical origin of users, another important fact is the number of pages consulted by each visitor: every user who happens to land  on the portal, navigates on average for about 18.80 pages. A high number, which underlines the quality of contents they contain, drawing many subscribers and keeping visitors at the site for a long time.

Compared to our direct competitors, as is evident from the banchmarking graph, that of Qbr is a strong reality, definitely above average. Analytics, in fact, allows us to make a comparison between our site and the averages of 100 sites in the same category: the data shows a real gap in our favour (highlighted with the red arrow) between the results obtained from others and those of Qbr.

Not bad for a chat that was born along the streets of one city.  What we are winning now is a game that is much bigger on a national scale establishing ourselves as the greatest Italian social network. And with the international platform of Ciaopeople.com, we  count on  growing even more and tackling a global challenge, bringing the social network made in Italy far beyond the borders.

How were these results possible and how does CiaoPeople intend to achieve its future objectives? Our SEO Strategist Diego Borrelli asks Gianluca Cozzolino, CEO of Ciaopeople, whose answer  we publish below.

Hi Diego. So many are asking the same question: how do you get 60,000 visitors a day from google?
The development of so many quality contents simply increases the popularity of our portals.
Search engines base the  ranking algorithms on the concept of link popularity. From the union of these two statements an answer is easily obtained.
The SEO cannot and will never be able to work alone, making miracles and make visits happen. The SEO represents, in my opinion, a way of seeing things. I can’t say it enough,  optimize your content for users, make them easily accessible and engines will reward you.

How do you get over 107,000 keywords visits?
The number of keywords is simply a reflection of what has been said before. Many contents (see approximately 300,000 pages indexed by Google) automatically generate such a number of keywords.

Are you still sure you don’t want to talk about international landing projects?
Yes!

Qbr was not and is not SEO oriented, by how much do you think we can increase EES visits with the new platform conceived, designed and developed with a facility prepared to accept the countless Google spiders?
A calculation of this kind is really complex. The factors involved are many. The following three aspects are surely worthy of note and will constitute a turning point in terms of visits:
1) Photos: all qbr.it images (just think of the photos of one million users) are totally invisible to search engines. Ciaopeople.com provides a page for each photo, enriched and then optimized through textual content posted by users. The current traffic from Google Images will have an important increase.

2) Videos: As in the case of photos, yesterday we were invisible, tomorrow I imagine there will be good visibility thanks to google sitemap videos.

3) Spacelog: The personal space of each user. Each user will have a third-level domain dedicated completely to its content. From the SEO point of view, it is certainly a courageous choice, spacelog is  technically composed of 500,000 virtually independent subdomains.

But once again, will it be the strength of social networks to help search engines, and how?
   1) the RUR, the user evaluation algorithm, will help us to establish the number of users who more actively participate in the social network. Whoever develops content quality will be rewarded by Rur and consequently gain visibility within CiaoPeople, visibility, which translates into links to their spacelog, links mean that trust …
2) the network, many friends means extended network and links from other spacelogs, meaning trust …

Do you think similar results similar to google.it can also be achieved on google.com?
Surely what has been done so far is “technically” successful also for google.com. It  is clear that we shall be dealing with much more competitive SERP with some of the strongest competitors today. But ours is an ambitious project from all points of view, I cannot wait to see us at work even in this new challenge!

Will I ever see the keyword chat on google.it  ranking high in the SERP?
Did I read that right? On google.it?

Claudia Saputo
Press Office Ciaopeople

The news of the explosion of boos that the “new-melodic” singer received by the public in his hometown has had a national resonance, also thanks to the news channel Rai whose direct news coverage of the event did not report on the boos but jumped to an different coverage.

Qbr was the first to report the event that has intrigued many Italians. Our article was printed  already by the early hours of the night and was rewarded with thousands of hits. 15,000 in a single day. Most of them do not come from our community, though both Neapolitan songwriters are much appreciated, but from search engines.

The success of July 9, however, is nothing but the fruit of the work we are doing and that, for a year now, tends towards a continuous improvement of the magazine in terms of quality of news and number of visits.

On the one hand, we try to calibrate our body of information to our young target, we provide our users with news they want to read, we facilitate the reading of the most challenging topics as current events  and politics, encourage reading with a rich multimedia of  photo and video.

On the other hand  we aim for external visits from search engines: here timeliness and a look at SEO in the drafting of articles were essential for growth that in a single year has increased from about 800 daily visits to 20,000 visits per day, of which 6,000 from Google.

Qbr.it, after about 5 years after its birth, is a reality of  90,000 visits per day. The magazine, born just over a year ago, allows to reach a total of about 100,000 visits daily for our social network which is now only a few days from a new beginning with Ciaopeople.com.

Claudia Saputo
Press Office Ciaopeople