Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 13, 2008 – 8:04 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m touring around China with bloggers. I hope to give you as many updates as possible about this land of endless opportunities. Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring me.
During this China 2.0 week, a rather large group of Beijing bloggers gathered in the Blue Frog, an American haven in China’s capital with excellent wifi. During a square (as in not round) table discussion about business 2.0 and outsourcing, tweets were pumped onto the web. The hashtag “china20” even ranked no. 1 trending topic at some point. The part of this discussion which interested me the most was the annoyance of Chinese bloggers about us, the western ones. The issue: we don’t paint a gray picture of China.
“Bloggers who speak little or no Chinese do lousy research”, complained Brendan O’Kane. “They find one English-writing blogger from China and project his beliefs and writings on all Chinese bloggers. Hence our image of being online nationalists”.
Richard from Peking Duck agrees with Brendan, but also admits he used to do the same when he started blogging back in 2002. “My blog used to be a wealth of misconceptions, a mess full of prejudice. Now I know better.”
“When my favorite bloggers from abroad address China, even the most liberal ones paint a black and white picture,” said Richard, concerning reports about human rights and censorship.” It’s actually pervasive in all western media”.
Brendan O’Kane
After hearing these complaints, I asked the two gentleman how we could paint a gray picture of the country they reside in. “Read lots of blogs about China to broaden your view”, said Brendan. “Try Fool’s Mountain“. Richard added that Peter Hessler from The New Yorker also writes interesting pieces about China.
I’d like to add that Brendan’s and Richard’s blog are also worth reading. They both have a sharp pen and use it to publicize their refreshing thoughts.
Photo credits: CN Reviews
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Written on October 30, 2008 – 9:32 am
Mircea Goia, Next Web US Webtipr
The crazy rush to free traffic for bloggers promised by the Blogrush network had came to an end without leaving the beta stage, unfortunately. The founder, John Reese, has closed the doors of the one year (or so) old company.
As he stated on the website’s frontpage “the service spread like wildfire all over the Web”. I don’t know if the bad economy or something else made them close the doors but Blogrush wasn’t monetized at all, not even with advertising. How did they survive? By losing a small fortune, the founder said. Concentrating on acquiring users and worrying about monetizing later? Well, I guess that was the mantra of almost every Web 2.0 startup which in this economy meltdown doesn’t cut it anymore.
The blogs from the network were scrutinized before getting accepted in the network (disclosure: my personal blog was rejected sometime ago) so they wanted to ensure the highest quality of it. It seems they have made some mistakes (not accepting my personal blog was one :)…ok,ok, I am joking) starting from selecting blogs, continuing with security issues and lower clickthrough rates, not to mention abusive users who tried to game the system (I don’t think there is a system which users won’t try to game).
The blogs then had to install a widget like this one on the right. 
The concept looks very much like the free banner exchange concept in the ’90s (and which, by the way, was a failure - I personally tried them at that time).
What is surprising is that the founder doesn’t want to sell the service although he got several offers. Why? That’s a mystery and he won’t tell it, of course. I don’t see the point of not selling to somebody who can keep the service running and maybe deal with all the problems it had. If you care about your users then you find ways to keep the service alive, even if that means selling. Or, at least you recover some of the lost fortune, if nothing else.
We wish you more luck in your future endeavours, John!
Written on October 21, 2008 – 6:36 pm
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
In these difficult economic times, it is important for all companies to become more cost-efficient. One of the ways you can lower your marketing costs is by turning to social media marketing (in case you’re not doing that already). Promoting your brand on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter doesn’t cost you anything (except for the salary of the person who’s doing the job) and is increasingly viewed as the best way to market your product to your target audience. Here’s a list of 35+ companies that are using social media to carry out their brand message, amongst them, Coca Cola, Cisco, Intel, Dell, etc.
Where’s your social media presence?
According to Phantom CTO, consumers even expect a social media presence from brands:
“The highlights of the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study came out recently. The results of the study point to a growing trend in how consumers want to be reached by businesses. The study found that 60% of American consumers use social media and of those more than half interact with businesses on social media websites. 93% of American consumers who use social media expect companies to have a social media presence and 85% of them believe those companies should be interacting with consumers through social media.
Cone Researchers say that the results mean that “Americans are eager to deepen their brand relationships through social media,” explains Mike Hollywood, director of new media for Cone, “it isn’t an intrusion into their lives, but rather a welcome channel for discussion.”
Some social networks statistics
Social networks ARE seen as a welcome channel for discussion by consumers. See below chart from Forrester as well which breaks down interest by age groups (Note: This research was done a few months back and percentages are probably higher by now):
Much like social networks, coverage in the blogosphere is also a great way to get exposure for your brand and targeting those bloggers who would be specifically interested in your product is the secret formula for receiving the exposure you need. Don’t forget that bloggers are opinion leaders and their “say” is a crucial factor determining your product’s success or failure. If you approach the right bloggers that you think would get added value from your product, and you are able to gain their devotion as users and writers, then you have received coverage directly targeted at the right audience, without paying a dime. (more…)
Written on September 10, 2008 – 9:52 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Just a reminder on the Wednesday morning that what we, millions of bloggers, do, isn’t that normal in the rest of the world. For many people, blogging whatever you want is an illusion. Like Mohamed Erraji, 29, who wrote in online newspaper Hespress that Morocco had been destroyed by a culture of handing out gifts and privileges by the government. According to him, begging has become a rewarding activity in the north African kingdom.
“It has made the Moroccans a people without dignity, who live by donations and gifts,” Erraji wrote.
The government took this as showing disrespect to the king, which is, according to Morocco’s press code, an offense. So Erraji was jailed on Friday and dragged to court on Monday, where he was sentenced to two years in prison and a hefty fine. He had no defense lawyer and the judgment only took ten minutes.
According to Reuters, Reporters Without Borders said the sentence was “worthy of the most totalitarian states” and demanded Erraji’s liberation. The government officials could not be reached for comment.
So while you and I start another day of blogging freely, somebody lives a captured life because of his writings. Just think about that every once in a while and consider to do a write-up on this as well.
Written on August 17, 2008 – 10:36 pm
Şekip Can Gökalp, Next Web Turkey WebTipr
Wednesday, I was checking Friendfeed to see if anything interesting happened and I saw that elmaaltshift was banned. Fırat Yıldız, the founder of this well known Turkish blog was telling that he was not warned or what so ever. I immediately clicked on the link and saw the famous big red warning “This site is banned due to court decision” For a second, I was also mad but then I thought of a small detail –that I was in Germany and the bans could only effect Turkish Internet users- that made me realize the true nature of this incidence. Fırat was protesting the Turkish government, which has banned a couple of hundred websites last year.
On Wednesday (13.08.2008) the protest got supported by Fırat’s friends, which are more or less the most active crowd in the Turkish blogosphere. Selim Yörük of anafikir.com prepared a simple code for all bloggers and websites to use, which would put the same message on their main pages. In four days, 167 blogs and websites including major blogs and portals such as sinema.com, futuristika.org, burak.com and cisday.org. You can view the full list of the protestors in anafikir.com/sansur. Selim says “Poeple just get used to lose their freedom. This experiment is trying to shock the people by trying to show them how it would be if sites get banned so fast. I think, it increased the awareness of people very well.”
Youtube, Netlog, Slide, Tagged and Alibaba are some of the major sites that were banned over the course of two years. Youtube for example is still banned and cannot be reached from Turkey. There are a zillion ways to get over the ban, but of course this is no excuse. There are also some gags, that are actually quite funny; IMDB.com was also going to be banned because some movie producers thought that IMDB is a source to download DIVX movies. Later on, it came out that they were trying to ban IMBD.com because of a typo. And as far as I know, IMDB was never banned…
Alibaba.com? Why ban an e-commerce platform? Does it damage the Turkish market? Or what about Slide.com? Why would one ever want to ban a presentation-sharing portal? There are many speculations about the reason of these bans. More than often, a court in a quite small town in Turkey will decide if the accused sites should be banned or not.
Is there a solution?
Başak Purut, a Turkish lawyer who specialized in these kind of processes says that “this kind of protests will lead us nowhere, because Turkish politicians absolutely don’t care which sites are banned and why.” He also thinks that the law will get stricter in the future and the only way to solve this issue is to get the attention of the EU, which would maybe talk Turkish politicians into changing the law that regulates the bans.
This is an option, that would solve the problem, but there is another solution for the companies that want to keep their products online in Turkey: Open an office in Turkey. Every company that wishes to get the huge amount of traffic from countries like Turkey, has to deal with the fact that it IS a different country with its own rules. Whether these rules are correct or not, is another discussion topic and it should be clear by now what I think of them, but it is also clear that these rules are not going to change for a while. Youtube was banned 3 or 4 times, and the last one lasted longer then three months (still on by the way). There is something wrong with that… It is a question of importance. How important is it to Youtube, a company of Google that it is down in Turkey for three months? Now there are rumous of a youtube.com.tr, a local version of youtube which will exclude illegal content. Global players have to consider these kind of ‘details’ or they lose markets to smaller local players faster than they can anticipate.
UPDATE: More blogs are starting to talk about this. Check this article on Techcrunch.
Written on March 31, 2008 – 11:07 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This morning I stumbled upon a site that shows a visualization of the popularity of Spanish bloggers. It’s called Blogocosa and based on data from the social network Bitacoras.com, that has more than 250,000 subscribers. They started tracking the popularity of these writers in January. The size of the images, 30×30, 60×60 and 90×90 pixels, depends on the number of followers each user has on the network.
Blogocosa gives a nice overview of a blogosphere that is totally unknown to me. Apparently Jordi Lagares, Andres Nieto Porras, and Fran J Saavedra are national blogging heroes. I found this link on the personal blog of Dutch social media maven Polle de Maagt and agree with his remarks on the poster. He says the page gives an incomplete overview, since it only includes bloggers from Bitacoras. Moreover, they don’t take expertises and niches in account.
However, it remains interesting to create some sort of ranking. International marketing bloggers already have a top 150 list: The Advertising Age Power 150. The ranking is based on eight sources, like the Google Pagerank, Technorati Authority, Yahoo InLinks, and Alexa Traffic. Although the ranking won’t ever be perfect, most people do take these ranking seriously.
Maybe it’s an idea to start a European Technology Blog Top 100? Hm, I’m gonna take it to the drawing board. Stay tuned.
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