Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 10th June 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Next week we will be attending Jeff Pulver’s 140Conference (@140conf) in New York!
We will be blogging our asses of to make sure you don’t miss a thing. Jack, founder of Twitter, is speaking and so is everybody else.
Want to join us at 140conf? Want to see @Wyclef Jean being interviewed on-stage by @sacca? Want to find out why @fredwilson invested in Twitter? Want to hear the story behind the sale of CNNBRK to CNN? James Cox (@imajes) will tell you all about it.
We have one VIP ticket to give away to our readers.
But you will have to earn it! (more…)
Written on 27th May 2009
5 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Techcrunch says that “ReTweets Are The New Currency Of The Web“. We will just have to see about that.
One thing IS clear; we tend to produce less and less written content.
Maybe that is good? I don’t know but this illustrations says more than, well, a retweet?
Found at David Armado’s blog
Written on 21st May 2009
19 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
With a personal blog, a Flickr account and Twitter you could say that my online identity is all over the place.
My blog does show my last 5 tweets and a random selection of Flickr photos but the main thing you notice when you visit it is that I haven’t been regularly blogging lately. IT simply isn’t a good representation of all my activities online. It looks like we are all waiting for a new format to bring all our online content together in one place.
Is FriendFeed the solution?
The next version of WordPress maybe?
Will Facebook solve our problems by integrating all?
Nobody really knows.
Amplifeeder (’a distributed social activity aggregator’) hopes to offer a solution to at least combine all your feeds in one screen. You could describe it as a meta search engine for your own stuff. It pulls data from FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr, your blog, any RSS feed and a few other sources and displays them on one page. Voila; your own Lifestream.
As a test I have set-up my own Lifestream page at http://boris.amplifeeder.com/
As you can see it all works just fine. Not surprisingly as the technology to pull in feeds is not very complicated. Amplifeeder offers an easy to use Dashboard where you can choose different templates and adjust your settings. It even shows me some basic stats so I know what I’m spending too much time on.
Conclusion: I don’t see myself abandoning my blog OR putting the address of my Lifestream on my business cards on anything like that. But Amplifeeder is a nice effort to solve the problem of scattered personal content.
The downside? you’ll need to have access to a server to install this bad boy.
The good news? Your in complete control.
You have nothing to lose by setting up your own Lifestream there so why not give it a try?
Written on 18th May 2009
9 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
The image below here shows why in the age of Twitter, Digg is starting to get less interesting to bloggers. Making it to the front page of Digg is still cool but just as hard (maybe even harder) as it was 3 years ago. Having your message retweeted is a lot easier. Also, 1 Digg doesn’t get you any traffic. 10 Diggs? No traffic. 100 Diggs? Well, only if it makes it to the ‘Upcoming’ section.
A retweet is ALWAYS good for traffic. I just checked the last 10 visitors from Twitter. They had a combined audience of 8116 followers, an average of 800 followers per user. One retweet potentially reaches those 800 followers.
In reality the reach of a retweet is a lot lower, of course. My guess is that a retweet gets an average 5% clickthrough. A link posted to 1000 followers generates 50 visitors. On average. A lot of our posts here get retweeted 50 or 100 times. You do the math.
Now take another look at the graph at the top. That graph is true for Blogs but doesn’t apply to retweets. Blogs need to be original. No point in writing about the same thing twice. Retweets are different. The whole purpose of a Retweet is to, well, repeat.
So, Tweetmeme is twice as interesting for us as bloggers than Digg. Digg is a zero-sum game. You either make it to the frontpage, or not. A retweet is always useful and it never gets dull.
The same goes for Techmeme. Making it to Techmeme is hard. You need to be first AND important enough to matter. I have always been disappointed however when we did make it (i’d say we make it to Techmeme about once a week) because although people seem to think this is a big deal I hardly ever saw any traffic coming from it.
Tweetmeme is a completely different beast. Make it to the front page of Tweetmeme and you see traffic! Lots of it! Which might also explain the surge of traffic to TweetMeme recently:
It is amazing that Digg didn’t/hasn’t/won’t launch TweetMeme functionality and the same goes for TechMeme. Just as Digg took away the throne from SlashDot it looks like TweetMeme is on track to do the same to Digg.
Of course this doesn’t mean we don’t WANT to make it to the Digg front page! If you definitely absolutely want to Digg this post we won’t stop you. Just don’t forget to retweet it too. ;-)
Written on 29th April 2009
1 COMMENT
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My cat is pretty quick but I am smarter so I can catch it if I want. My cat can also catch mice. I’m not sure if mice are dumber or smarter than cats but they CAN be caught by cats. But I can’t catch a mouse with my bare hands. They are simply too fast for me.
I can catch my cat and my cat can catch a mouse but I can’t catch mice.
Are you following me? This makes sense, right?
But it doesn’t make sense to big companies. They figure:
‘We have enough money to buy this little start-up that offers this solution to this problem so we sure as hell can just build this solution ourselves and save us the trouble and money of buying it’
But the ‘Buy or Build’ decision is slightly more complicated than that. The fact that you can buy a company doesn’t mean you can also build what they can build.
Being a cat catcher doesn’t make you good at catching mice.
Scale DOES matter.
More mental ammunition for you if you ever find yourself negotiating with a big company.
But wait! It also works the other way around! Catching a mouse or catching 100.000 mice is not the same. When you catch one mouse you are dealing with one mouse. If you are catching 100.000 mice you are dealing with mousecatchers. Herding mice or herding mousecatchers are two very different things.
But you knew this.
Maybe you didn’t know this: cats don’t play with mice for fun, practice or out of ignorance. They play with mice because the terror of being eaten alive by a cat makes the mouse’s meat taste sweeter. Apply that to the cat & mouse games that are played during negotiations and you can figure out what I could blog about that.
Previously published here.
Written on 28th April 2009
4 COMMENTS
Giovanni,
WWW megastar Robert Scoble has reached such popularity that he’s become a blogger who doesn’t need to ask anything of their blog design – irrespective of the fact that he’s been known to slate startups for their poor site designs(!)
As simple as a paleochristian architect reinventing roman epic temples and palaces, Scoble seems to have given up even to a standard Wordpress blog template, to better contemplate the truth(s) of the social web.
With the only support of the Sandbox theme, Robert is bravely standing up against herds of commenters, simply asking for a font different from Times New Roman:
“I wanted to see if it would have a major impact on traffic. It did not. [..] I wanted to see who would complain and who would praise it. Some complained that it was too unprofessional. Others complained it?s hard to read on high resolution monitors (the text goes all the way across the browser)”.
To tell the truth, I’m finding the approach rather innovative; focus on content and let the social networking sites do the rest. Maybe, for blogs, the widgets and clutter era has really begun to fade away. Whilst we realise Scoble’s just ‘in between’ site designs and is likely to soon return to ads and perfectly implemented sidebars, it’s interesting to consider the days of widgets and clutter gradually fading away.
And by the way, Robert, please don’t let them turn Times New Roman the new Comic Sans.
Written on 24th April 2009
15 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Andrew Keen says that blogs are dead.
Matt Mullenweg says that blogging is only getting bigger.
Of course, they are both wrong.
The ways to promote yourself online are increasing every year. Once upon a time all we had was homepages with hard to remember urls at free hosting services which plastered our pages with bright and animated ads. We used the Blink tag, lots of animated gifs and some text. The most used sentence, no doubt, was “Under Construction”.
After that we evolved and started blogging. No more blinking eyecandy but nicely designed Themes with lots of useful widgets in the sidebar. And Google ads so we could earn some money. We wrote 2 posts a day in the first week, 1 posts a day in the second week then 1 post in the next month and then we simply stopped.
Now we have Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace pofiles, a personal and business blog, Delicious and StumbleUpOn tagged links collections and a Twitter and Flickr account.
I remember when I blogged a lot on my personal blog I used to start with a simple idea (one that would probably fit in 140 characters) and sit down to write a blog post about it. I wrote an introduction, 3 examples and a conclusion. Then I added an illustration, some tags and a few hyperlinks and published. That generally took an hour.
Now I just tweet the simple idea I started out with and I’m done.
So, are blogs dead? No, of course not. Blogs are maturing and starting to follow basic economic principles where wealth (visitors, readers, audience) is unequally distributed. In the year 2000 the richest 1% of adults alone own 40% of global assets. That is how wealth is distributed in our world. When blogging started to hype the general idea was that everybody could make money from his or her blog and have an audience. Wealth (our readers) would be equally distributed.
In reality it turns out that most blogs have no more than 10 followers a month. In terms of audience these are the worlds poor. The bottom 50% of the world owns barely 1% of global wealth. Blogs are no exception to this unfortunate fact. We were hoping that the Lorenz Curve (the 80/20 rule) wouldn’t apply to blogging.
We now know it does.
On Twitter or Facebook these numbers work differently. If you have a Twitter accunt with 100 followers you might be perfectly happy with that. There is no need to make money on Twitter or get a huge following. A few interested listeners can make the whole experience worthwhile.
All of this leads to a huge shift from blogging to Twitter. Or to Microblogging in general. Matt Mullenweg told the audience at The Next Web Conference that in his experience blogging was actually growing. What he probably meant is that the top bloggers are receiving more visitors because Twitter and Facebook make sharing links easier.
I have no doubt however that a lot of people who would have started a blog 2 years ago are now building their profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook or simply sticking to Twitter.
Anyone who says that blogging is dead has little or no sense of history. New technologies never ‘kill’ their predecessors. Television didn’t kill Radio and the Internet didn’t kill the Television. They all get a share of our attention and find their own audiences.
Blogs are dead?
No, The rumors of bloggings death have been greatly exaggerated…
Written on 31st March 2009
10 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Tumblr, the tumblelogs platform, have released a neat little Question and Answers facility.
Simply end your post title with a “?” and instead of comments, people can leave you answers to your question. It’s uncertain whether the feature will lead to a section of the site devoted to it. What’s more likely is that someone thought it would be a bit of fun to try out and they’ll see how things go from there! :)
Whilst I still can’t convince myself to commit to Tumblr, mainly because of the awful search rankings for most tumblr blogs (try finding the official Tumblr blog via Google)..it’s definitely a neat little feature all the same.
via Kristian Salonen in the Apps room on Friendfeed.
Written on 11th February 2009
78 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Working TwitterRemote example:
At The Next Web Blog we love to report on what the future of the web looks like. And if we get a chance we love to help shape it ourselves. Next to a blog (and a conference!) we also have an active Incubator with shares in several projects and companies.
One of those projects is TwitterCounter. We launched TwitterCounter in June 2008 after we found out that more and more people were ignoring our RSS feed because they were getting our new post notifications via Twitter. If that is happening, we need a Feedburner for Twitter, is what we thought.
And so we built it and launched it, all within 48 hours.
Since then we have grown fast and we are now generating more than 3 million TwitterCounters per day, we generate 30.000 pageviews a day on TwitterCounter.com and sell the Featured spot on the front page for $500 a week.
Yes, five hundred a week and we are sold out until April!
We are constantly working on new features ands improvements for TwitterCounter with the 2.5 developers we have. I’m only half a developer and am lucky to be able to rely on Arjen and Maurits to do most of the heavy work.
The last two weeks we have been working day and night to launch a new and exciting feature which we call TwitterRemote.
TwitterRemote is a small widget you can embed on your site, blog or social profile which displays which Twitter users recently visited your blog. The catch: those Twitter users do have to sign into TwitterRemote first. For now we actually have to ask people for their username + password. As soon as Twitter launched OAuth we will skip that step completely.
After twitter users sign in their profile is displayed on every TwitterRemote enabled website they visit after that. The advantage for site owners is that they see who visits their site and they even have an opportunity to contact these people. Twitter users get a change to improve their visibility for site owners and other visitors. It is kinda like MyBlogLog, or FaceBook connect, but for Twitter!
We tested the service with 200 people for the last 2 days and are now ready to get more testers involved. As always, we highly appreciate any feedback!
Get Your own TwitterRemote:
http://twittercounter.com/pages/remote
Examples
A few examples of TwitterRemote enabled websites (Let me know if when add TwitterRemote to your blog and I will give you a link here too!):
http://thenextweb.com
http://bomega.com
http://fearlessblogger.com/
http://digitalbiographer.com/
http://ekive.blogspot.com/
http://webdeveloper2.com/
http://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/
http://espreson.com/
http://dirty-martinis.com/
http://www.mobile-zeitgeist.com/
http://www.arnehulstein.nl/
http://technmarketing.com/
http://saraolive.com/blog/
http://tech0ster.blogspot.com
http://www.acestartups.com
Reviews
Quote from Mashable: “Frankly, this is a fantastic creation.”
http://mashable.com/2009/02/11/twitterremote/
Quote from HughBriss: “If everyone starts using this on their blogs it will be an excellent way for visitors to those sites to get new followers. Very cool.”
http://hughbriss.com/slick-new-twitter-visitor-widget-for-your-website/
Written on 10th February 2009
6 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
“…We are developing tools to make “any app, any site, any friends” a reality.”
The Social Web Blog is focused on readers who “interested or involved” in making the web more social. It is Google’s 80th official blog and with it, they aim to capture the interest of individuals, founders, website owners and anyone who is interested in developing a community online.
They aim to keep readers better informed about Google’s social initiatives such as Google Friend Connect as well as keep their eyes open to readers ideas of how to make the web a more social place.
Visit the blog here to have a nosy round and join Google Friend Connect for the blog or simply subscribe to their RSS feed here.
"jeff pulver", 140conf, blog, conference, investments, speak, ticket, tweet, tweeting, tweets, twitter
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 off, the future of the Web. (More info 
