2023 review

Hi,

What a crazy year, right? As 2023 comes to an end, let's take stock together in this last newsletter of the year.

Quite a few changes this year that I would like to come back to. Despite a few pauses, your interest and your messages have always reminded me of the importance of our exchanges.

In this last meeting of 2023 we take stock of everything that marked me this year.

So, take a moment to breathe before diving into a year 2024 which promises to be exciting.

2023 was a year of changes and irregularities for the newsletter.

Change first with the transition from the Substack to Ghost platform in April (I explain here why). A change that I don't regret even if I didn't take advantage of what Ghost brings as much as I would have liked.

Irregularity then because after 3 years of almost flawless regularity, at the start of the school year I completely abandoned all publication on the newsletter. And yet not a week goes by without me coming across a resource that I want to share, I can no longer count the number of times I have received messages from readers asking me when this meeting was coming back.

I was completely caught up in my professional projects and I was unable to make time in my diary to offer you your weekly dose.

But rest assured, we're going to get back to good habits in 2024.

The podcast

This year also marks the end (permanent certainly) of the podcast that we've been hosting for 3 years with Rémi: Another Tech Podcast.

The reason? Despite our pleasure in discussing tech changes every week, the stagnant audience got the better of our motivation.

3 years without seeing the audience progress to match our efforts made us decide to put our energy elsewhere. And yet we love talking tech with Rémi.

After the summer during a lunch we came to the conclusion that if we always had so much to share the support and the format were by design not conducive to discoverability and virality.

Indeed, a podcast is very hard to discover, no algorithm or feed like a search engine or a social network. Healthy growth is slow and organic.

When I also say that by design, our podcast was not made to be viral, it is because one of the means by which certain podcasts become popular is by inviting people who have an audience. Now Rémi & I were generally alone to discuss.

I have excellent memories of it, and without bragging about it, we were often quite pioneers in the subjects we discussed.

Indeed, during the 82 episodes that we recorded, we addressed a wide variety of subjects: thethe role of Taiwan in world geopolitics, NFTs, apps to sleep better, generative AI (from May 2022), the Fediverse, an application that allows you to identify anyone, Google's complicated future, digital sovereignty, the city of the future, e-reputation, the second brain, virtual influencers, automation and quite a few topics around AI....

The interest is that each episode is very educational and remains completely topical because there is a lot of work done there popularization.

You can find the episode history here or in your favorite podcast application (see even on Youtube).

Le Bal Digital

In parallel with my other activities I have been asked several times to intervene in a studio program organized every 2 months by Grand Dialogue Canal Chat.

I share with experts my experience in digital communication on different themes.

Here are some of the topics that we have discussed in recent months:

The impact of social networks

The impact of AI

Change Management

My flagship applications

I remain a tech lover and this year again I came across tools or applications that have become part of my daily life:

ChatGPT: of course! The release of a mobile application that allows me to hold discussions with an AI instead of typing my questions is a game changer. We are not very far from Iron Man's Jarvis. It understands, it clarifies, it summarizes and it responds, it is sometimes more relevant in terms of exchanges than with certain people ;-) Since ChatGPT is multi-modal and it also allows you to decrypt an image/photo, it opens up a lot of new use cases.

Midjourney : Even if I haven't used it professionally, I loved playing with Midjourney, this generative AI which generates incredible images, the illustration in this article is an example. I started testing Midjourney with version 4 and in just a few months it has made such progress that the result produced by V6 (released in December 2023) is now almost undetectable.

Evolution of Midjourney results on the same prompt in 18 months (source)

Arc Browser: A real favorite of this Web browser which is teeming with good ideas and is the most innovative and well-made thing I have seen since Google Chrome around fifteen years ago. Initially released on Mac, the Windows version is currently in beta.

Artifact: I, who read a lot of content for my waking hours, had for a long time been looking for the spiritual replacement for Zite, a brilliant application that learned from your readings to make personalized suggestions. This is precisely what Artifact, the latest application from the creators of Instagram, does best. All based on AI, it's terribly effective (listen to the podcast we dedicated to it).

Mem.ai: Note-taking tools are as annoying as they are useful. For many, the phone's Notes application will do the job perfectly, but if you're looking to get the most out of your notes, Mem.ai is a very interesting application. Minimalist in its design and layout options, it does 2 things better than the others:

Automatic organization of notes based on their title and content
Possibility of querying your notes as you would with an assistant and obtaining detailed and reasoned answers thanks to the integration of ChatGTP

These AI functions are not free but once you have tasted them...(listen to the podcast we dedicated to it).

The awakening of AI

Speaking of AI, this year will remain the year when generative AI made its sensational entry into my uses.

ChatGPT has all the sauces for writing, synthesizing, analyzing data, learning,...

Generators of Midjourney-type images to challenge the limits of imagination.

Applications that use AI to:

Generate imaginary portraits of us (AI portrait)
Summarize articles (Artifact)
Query your notes (Mem.AI)
Write responses to emails (Spark)
Synthesize a meeting (Upmeet)

Every week I discovered new uses while the majority of people continue to miss out on everything that AI can provide.

I am clearly going to move up a gear next year next in the field.

Which brings me to my last subject, professional life.

And on the pro side?

An intense year with its share of changes on the pro side. People I grew up with and people I tried to grow are gone. New ones have arrived or will stay longer than expected, which brings a breath of fresh air which is always positive.

This year, supported by a highly complementary pair, we have made giant strides in what is certainly the most ambitious project I have had to carry out since I have been working. A disruptive Intranet project, for thousands of users, innovative and very political which gave me the opportunity to develop new skills.

A project that I have been carrying out for 2 years now and for which we have literally moved mountains.

2022 was the year of vision
2023 that of construction
2024 will be that of delivery from the 1st quarter

A project that takes up a lot of my brain time (including at night), which is one of the reasons for my absences in your mailbox because after intense days, it is complicated to get back in front of the computer to write these emails. But it’s a project I can’t wait to see come to fruition as it contains so many things I believe in. Then it will be time for me to move on to the next chapter of my professional life.

Here you go for this final newsletter for 2023.

I find this review exercise always interesting because it is an opportunity to reflect and analyze the highlights of the year.

See you at the beginning of 2024 to get back into the good habit of this weekly meeting.

The newsletter