I asked to a dear Ital­ian friend of mine and one of my uni­ver­sity class­mates, whom I know since 15 years, to give me a lit­tle help to spread the word about and to add some con­tent in Blomap, the online social net­work I have just launched.
My friend is a very nice and alive girl, a gifted PR and a jour­nal­ist work­ing at RAI, the Ital­ian pub­lic television. 

First issues she met in Italy is the fact that Blomap is in English.

Actu­ally –I answered– Blomap lets users choose the lan­guage of each of their posts.
But Eng­lish seems to be an insur­mount­able bar­rier and I could not agree more since the big boom Face­book has had after its local­i­sa­tion and trans­la­tion in sev­eral languages.

So trans­lat­ing the few and basic con­tent of Blomap is becom­ing a pri­or­ity.
I hope users would agree that leav­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of brows­ing the con­tent in sev­eral lan­guages could stay as fur­ther oppor­tu­nity to be exploited by the many poly­glots in the world.

In addi­tion to that my friend tried to help me by copy­ing and past­ing in Blomap a review picked up in another web­site.
First, she posted it as com­ment to a post about another restau­rant.
Then, after my sug­ges­tion to post the infor­ma­tion in the right place, she prop­erly posted it as a review.
For­tu­nately I checked the con­tent because I found it a copy of another review belong­ing to another website.

So I had to write a new review in her place and ask her to post only real, trusty, orig­i­nal and qual­ity con­tent.

Her answer to my sug­ges­tion was: ‘I posted the ban­ner of the web­site of that restau­rant on Blomap by pur­pose, because it is right and fair to quote it and insert it oth­er­wise we make “hid­den” adver­tis­ing in an inter­na­tional web­site. Kiss, your friend’.

My reply:“Dear friend, it is not as you said.
A ban­ner is an ad space not a text con­tent itself.
The search engines ban your web­site, if you copy and past text from a web­site into another. 

In addi­tion to that we just ben­e­fit peo­ple or com­pa­nies if we make free adver­tis­ing for them. Nev­er­the­less I would speak of or make infor­ma­tion in a com­mu­nity, instead of ‘advertising’.

Adver­tise­ments, which will be posted on Blomap in the future to finan­cially sup­port the web­site, will be con­cen­trated on real and qual­ity con­tent and facts.

Even if Blomap mainly pro­vides microblog­ging, those short texts must be use­ful and trusty for the users.

Then “hid­den” adver­tis­ing is some­thing dif­fer­ent from what you said. It occurs when some­one pays some­one else to con­ceal­ing adver­tise a prod­uct, when and where adver­tis­ing is for­bid­den or when you should have paid some­one else. For instance there are many cases of those “hid­den” ads in TV movies. 

My ques­tion is: why do you find ‘hid­den’ ads con­cern­ing Blomap and think that your copy­ing and past­ing of con­tent from a web­site into another, with­out any ref­er­ence to your source, would keep us safe from that?

Apart from that, the Web and specif­i­cally the Social Media indus­try is rev­o­lu­tion­is­ing every­thing.
To be short, since the speech about could be very long, all Media are grad­u­ally con­verg­ing in the Web and in Social Media. 

We are mov­ing from the infor­ma­tion era to the inter­ac­tion era.

Do you remem­ber our lec­tur­ers at the fac­ulty of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Sci­ences at La Sapienza Uni­ver­sity in Rome announc­ing the Infor­ma­tion era in the far 1998–2000? 

You, my friend, as a young per­son work­ing in the infor­ma­tion indus­try, could become a spokesper­son of all of that, but before doing that you should under­stand all new processes and dynam­ics in depth, oth­er­wise you could get con­fused as it hap­pened when you approched Blomap.’

At the end of our con­ver­sa­tion I won­dered: is it that a repro­pose of the dis­cus­sion between main­stream and online jour­nal­ists and media?
How­ever, I have other anec­dotes about the Ital­ian inter­ac­tion era I will tell you soon about. I am sure you will find them interesting.