Bloggers VS Journalist. It is a popular discussion during Internet Conferences.
Old media VS New Media? Who is right? Who is wrong and who has a future left?
Fact is that newspaper audiences are declining and so is advertising revenue.
Which brings us to Superman. Do you think his blogpost will make it to the Digg front page?
I hope you like that post!
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You would think that the Internet would be mobile now. That all connections travel from east to west, and back, via satellites and radio waves. That isn’t how it works. The Internet is visible, tangible, breakable, and wet.
As you can see in this beautiful illustration (click it for a larger image!) the main continents are connected by less than 10cm thick Fiber Optic cables.
Those cables are generally 69 mm in diameter and weigh over 10.000 kilograms a kilometer. In deeper waters, lighter and less insulated cables are used. The capacity for these combined cables is more than 7 million bits per second.
That capacity is rarely used though. In general only 29% is in use. Of that 29% more than 70% is for Internet Traffic.
So, feel free to download more and bigger files from those transatlantic servers. The capacity is there so why not use it?
Is ‘Inter-net’ a French word? Where does TCP-IP come from? What was Arpanets role in the History of the Internet? It is all explained in this beautifully animated small documentary. We played it during lunch at the office today.
That is it! Party time is over!
No more champagne and stuffed turkey.
Back to the drawing board!
It is now January 5th and there are no excuses left to NOT work on that beautiful start-up you vowed to start in the new year.
We here at The Next Web Blog and Conference are eager to start the year and work on some exciting projects for you. We will keep reporting on anything that is of any interest for the International Internet Professionals reading this blog and we have already started preparing for the fourth edition of The Next Web Conference
This years edition of our conference which will take place on April 15, 16 and 17 in 2009 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We will launch the official site and start selling tickets in only a few weeks.
We hope you will enjoy our blog even more in 2009 than you did in previous years and keep commenting and sending in news and tips.
Layers.com is a soon to launch Web Annotation service.
Another one?
Yes, another one.
There have been countless efforts to create a usable Web Annotation service. Diigo is one, Fleck is one (our own version) and there was the once popular Third Voice. Nobody seems to have found the right combination of scalability, user interface, compatibility and viral growth that you need to turn such a service into a widely used successful service.
“Imagine if you could pull a transparent layer over any webpage and then you could create upon it. You could annotate, draw graffiti, embed video, photos or do whatever you want. Then, by providing a link, others could see your layer (with the original content beneath it) and you could see layers created by other people. You could follow your friends and see all the layers they create. You could go to any webpage and see any of the layers that have been created over that site.”
They are still in closed beta but the preview video looks amazingly cool and looks like exactly the service you would want to use. Check it out and sign up at Layers.com with invitation code “create1108” for an account.
♬ ‘Tis the Season, fa la la la la, la la la laaa, for aster eggs on the web. ♫
♪ Fa la la la la visit Flickr, and la la la la la go to any photo. ♪
♬ Then add “?snow=1″ to the end of the url. ♬
♫ Sit back and fa la la relax.. ♪
Ivan Brezak Brkan, Chief Evangelist for Shout’Em, just announced that they have raised €350.000 in seed funding from Bicro Ltd. Bicro is not a regular venture capitalist but a goverment founded 30 million Euro seed fund to support innovation and technology advacement in Croatia.
We earlier reviewed Shout’Em (Shout’Em = Roll your own Twitter) and were slightly skeptical at the chance of success for this service. We ‘rolled our own Twitter’ which you can check out here: The Next Web Shout’Em. As you can see that particular network didn’t get a lot of attention from us or our members. Mashable also set-up their own network (Mashable Shout’Em) but, even with their enormous audience, that network contains no interesting content.
It might just be that Shout’Em is more popular with companies and educational organizations as a sort or Intranet solution than with blog communities. They currently have more than a 1000 private networks and are planning to launch mobile applications for the Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile and Android platforms soon. The platform also seems to be hot in emerging markets such as Russia, China and South America.
Ivan describes Shout’Em as the ‘Ning for microblogging’ which sounds ambitious and promising. They do however have to compete with Twitter, Yammer and all the other microblogging networks out there.
For now; congratulations on raising money in such tough times and good luck with the service.
To our readers; Try to post your comments in our The Next Web Shout’Em. Lets give it one more try!
Written on January 8, 2009 – 2:14 pm
Bloggers VS Journalist. It is a popular discussion during Internet Conferences.
Ivan Brezak Brkan, Chief Evangelist for 
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
