Archive of thenextweb.com
You might not expect it, but when it comes to social media even the Pope is switched on. A new decree from The Vatican encourages Catholic priests to start blogs and embrace the web.
Ahead of the 44th World Day of Communications, Pope Benedict XVI has issued a message urging priests to use new media to help spread the Gospel in their communities.
The message, entitled The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word, encourages priests to follow in the footsteps of the Pope himself, who already has a YouTube channel, Facebook application and iPhone app, all accessible via his Pope2You site. (more…)
Over the past few months we have heard a lot of rumors about MyBlogLog. A service that Today our friends at ReadWriteWeb broke the story that Yahoo is about to kill MyBlogLog.
Inside MyBlogLog
It was obvious that Yahoo was struggling with ideas with exactly what to do with MBL after they had acquired it for $10 million back in early 2007. In talks with one of our editors Yahoo told us that the initial idea for MBL was that Yahoo would know what pages MBL users visit outside of their own domains. Update: They specifically wanted to know what UCG their users frequented per Yahoo subdomain. This data is valuable for their search technology and index. The problem is that a lot of the MBL widgets are installed on pages with low traffic (read unimportant content). So Yahoo isn’t getting the data that they were hoping to get. The MBL widget is installed on ‘a couple of hundred thousand domains’ and the widget is generated a billion times per day! You can imagine that the operating costs are much higher than the actual benefits. Update: With Yahoo’s infrastructure the costs of operation is almost nothing (apart from time and effort by management and development – if any) (more…)
“Can you blog, Twitter, Flickr or Facebook better than mere mortals?”
If so, Dutch clothing company G-Star Raw has put out the call for fashion reporters. G-Star Raw is famous for its innovative denim styles. They’ve been around since 1989 and have two flagship stores. One is located in New York, NY and the other in Amsterdam. However, they have retail locations all over the world.
They’ve taken the Social Media route to recruiting. Candidates can apply via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. They’re offering reporters a chance to report from New York Fashion Week from February 12-16, 2010. Reporters will get access to the G-Star show and also be able to report from backstage. It’s not 100% clear what other shows and events they’ll go to, but I’m pretty sure they’ll be all over town that week! (more…)
Last week Eytan Galai, brother of Yaron Galai (Founder of Quigo that sold to AOL) showed off all the latest that’s been happening over at Outbrain.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Outbrain is a content ratings & recommendations widget that sits on many sites across the web. We use it ourselves at the bottom of our posts.
Recently Outbrain launched its revenue program OutLoud. For just $10 a month, you can submit an interesting article to OutLoud. Outbrain will then take the articles you submitted and recommend them on relevant pages across the thousands of sites using their content recommendation engine, from USA Today, Slate, The Next Web, Fox and Tribune to Golf.com, and the SportingNews.
When I started questioning the high monthly fee, Eytan insisted that I give him any two links I desire which he will then put into the system and let me see the results for myself. Last Wednesday I sent Outbrain the links and they were put into the system on Friday. Once I activated my account online I was able to get into the section called “Advertising Report” – there I found and could follow analytics data such as # of impressions and clicks for each link submitted. (more…)
2009 is the year the web starts to go realtime. With Google Wave about to make discussion and collaboration faster and FriendFeed serving up content as soon as it gets it, isn’t it time blogs caught up?
There are a number of standards being developed that allow RSS Readers to update as soon as a blogger has hit ‘Publish’ on a post. Here is a round up of some of the ways you can take your blogging (and blog reading) realtime.
RSSCloud
Launched yesterday, RSSCloud is based on the long-in-the-tooth but little used <cloud> element in the RSS specification. It allows blogs to tell RSS readers when they’ve been updated. This beats the usual slow way an RSS Reader has to check back with a blog’s feed to see if it’s updated.
The big news is Wordpress.com, host for a claimed 7.5 million blogs, has switched on support for RSS Cloud. Now all those blogs can now update in realtime. The problem is RSS readers need to support it too. Currently only River2, the new reader from ‘father of RSS’, Dave Winer, supports RSSCloud. The real benefit for most users will be if Google Reader and Microsoft Outlook switch on support for the service. (more…)
Technorati used to be the darling of the Blogging industry. Unfortunately they have lost some of their shine in these past years with declining market share, bugs and downtime, and an unclear strategy for the future.
Or so it seems.
Traffic seems to be steady at around 3 million uniques a month which is not bad for a blog but not good enough for a search engine. There are several ways to fix their torn image and the many software bugs plaguing the site.
Technorati seems to have chosen the least expected one: they are becoming a blog.
Yesterday a lot of people received an invitation to start blogging for technorati.
Here it is:
Become a Technorati Writer!
Technorati is entering into the next phase of our evolution: original content.
Beginning in October, Technorati will feature original content on the site written by bloggers just like you! This is an amazing opportunity to give your writing vast exposure, become known as an expert in your field/s of interest, and to join a vibrant writer community.
Get in on the ground floor by signing up via the Technorati Contact Page.
Select the “New: Technorati Writer Signup” option from the “Message Type” drop-down box.
You will receive information and writing instructions as we get closer to launch date.
We very much look forward to working with you!
On that form there is another bit of information:
If you are interested in publishing your articles on any of Technorati’s channels, please include a link to your blog (or your writing samples) in the URL field. In the message, be sure to mention your areas of interest and any other nuggets about yourself you want to share. In the coming weeks you will receive (more…)
Online sharing and blogging service Posterous has been getting a lot of attention recently. The development team is adding features regularly and it’s fast becoming the best way to share content with all your different social services while also keeping it all in one place too. The best bit is you can do it all via email.
With so many ways to use Posterous it can be difficult to keep track of them all. Here we’ll take you through everything you need to know about it and suggest a range of ways you can use it to make your online life easier.
(more…)
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.
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…
