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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Written on January 8, 2009 – 1:54 am Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
Now on first glance, you may wonder what exactly is so exciting about “post by moderation”?? Surely this is something which should have been integrated from the beginning. Well, this is why it’s exciting - the feature is for “group blogs”. Still confused? Let me explain…
Posterous is a blogging platform just like wordpress, typepad and others. How it distinguishes itself is that it focuses primarily on blogging via email and therefore making the process much simpler to use and open to anyone who knows how to send an email, Grandma.
Last month, the startup launched “group blogs” which allow for numerous editors to edit/post to the same blog. With this new update, a blog such as Posterous Recipes for example can hand out an email address, people can send in their recipes and simply moderate the various recipe posts they receive. It really couldn’t be much simpler and with the right idea, you could potentially have a great site with contributions from tens, hundreds or even thousands worldwide. I am curious as to how they’re protecting users from floods of spammers but it is curiosity rather than a possible flaw, these guys know what they’re doing.
If you haven’t at least tried Posterous out yet, you need to. Posting via email has never felt so good.
Written on December 24, 2008 – 11:05 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When you’re blogging every damn day of the week, Wordpress becomes your main living environment. Thus a little disclosure would be correct. If you feel my reports about Wordpress are a little bit over the top (maybe ecstatic), it’s only because I spent too much time working with it. Now that we’ve got that out of our way: let’s talk about Wordpress 2.8.
In an article on the official Wordpress blog, Jane “working on experience stuff” Wells writes that after 600,000 Wordpress 2.7 downloads, it’s about time to work on Wordpress 2.8. Screw Christmas, let’s prioritize. That’s basically her message.
Instead of chewing away turkey, you better complete the Wordpress 2.8 survey before noon on December 31, 2008 UTC. In this long list, you can rate which new possible feature you’d like the best. Do you prefer an “Embedded theme browser/installer” or will a “Threaded view in comments admin for replies” improve your work flow? Cast your votes at Polldaddy’s.
Oh and you know what? The best thing of the story is that you don’t have to manually upgrade Wordpress anymore. Just hit an ok button, and 2.8 will be yours.
Written on November 24, 2008 – 8:47 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might have noticed, I wrote a post last week about my three-week stay in Kathmandu, Nepal. After describing the beautiful country and its not so beautiful political problems, I invited every reader to drop me a line if he or she knew somebody in Kathmandu. Two people did.
Kathmandu Koding
One of them was Mark Townsend. He introduced me to Ayush Bajracharya, a 26-year old PHP developer from Patan, a gorgeous satellite city of Kathmandu. Ayush works for Samma Ajiva Limited, a company involved in several outsourcing projects. When I told Ayush about my Dutch nationality, he told me he functions as a cupid in my country since he developed a dating site called Zullenwij.nl.
Alternative to India and China
After spending a week here I got to know a lot of people like Ayush who are working on outsourcing projects. So while Tim Ferriss advises you to give your developer work a spin in India and Chinese companies desperately try to catch up with the outsourcing giant - Nepal might be an interesting alternative. One minor side note, it seems like the best way of finding a developer is actually visiting the country (which is no punishment at all).
Meeting locals through blogging
If outsourcing doesn’t concern you, then please learn one thing from this post. Traveling and blogging is one fine combination. When I went to Berlin earlier this year, I met up with some great music 2.0 fellows thanks to a post on this blog. And now it turns out that this strategy also works in more exotic places like Nepal. I realized this when drinking tea with Ayush and his younger brother Raz in a house that doesn’t even look a bit like mine. Our languages, habits, and religious beliefs are all different, but it was blogging that connected us. Pretty cool, eh?
Written on November 18, 2008 – 10:02 pm Zee, Internet Marketer, Design Connoisseur & Web App Devotee
During this economic climate Journalists, as with many other professions, have taken a hit. Six Apart, the blog publishing company, has come up with an interesting way to help those poor journalists get back on the grind - they’ve called it TypePad Journalist Bailout Programme .
Just send them them a link to your last piece for a newspaper, magazine or broadcast journalism venue to bailout@sixapart.com.
Sixapart have been quoted as saying
“While we’re obviously having a bit of fun with the “bailout” name, this program is something we’re serious about. The dollar value for you for the TypePad subscription alone works out to over $150 a year, but we know that for a lot of working journalists, one of the biggest obstacles towards independence can be just trying to figure out where to start. Now you’ve got an answer.
You’ve got to hand it to them, it’s definitely a novel idea and apparently there has been great interest so get on the bandwagon while you still can journos!
Written on November 16, 2008 – 9:49 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.
Lunch with Andrew Lih
Blogging is fighting for its image in the US, where one web influential after the other declares the medium dead. These statements by Calacanis and the likes seem rather odd, as blogging is the communication channel in thousands of niches. In China however, blogging might be really dead.
In the west, blogs ousted bulletin boards and forums from the market. This never happened in China, where the bulletin boards still flourish. Better yet, the discussion platforms keep growing. According to author Andrew Lih, there are two main reasons for this phenomenon.
BBS are anonymous. Well, actually, semi-anonymous since people do have nicknames and build up reputations. For reasons well known, anonymity comes in handy in China.
Users get more comments on their BBS writings, sometimes thousands. As for blogging, it can be lonely out there.
Impressive numbers
When Web2Asia’s George Godula gave a presentation about Chinese social networks, he mentioned the following numbers about BBS. There are three billion registered BBS users (users can be members of multiple BBS). More than 60 percent of the users log on to at least three different BBS more than three times a week. Every day, ten million posts are published which manage to attract a total of 1.6 billion page views.
Source for journalists
No wonder Chinese journalists use BBS to see what the public opinion is like. Especially in the occurrence of breaking news. When the disastrous earthquake rocked Sichuan in May this year, journalists scouted the BBS to see what the Chinese people were really thinking of the disaster and its implications. “Because,’ said Lih, “that’s where the honest conversations take place”.
WordPress 2.7 is still scheduled for release in November and it is going to be huge! Here are some of the planned features for this version:
Dashboard Redesign, Drag and Drop arrangements, Sticky posts, Single Insert Media button, Quick Inline Editing, Comments API, Dashboard comment replies, Threaded comments, Keyboard Shortcuts, Automatic plugin/theme install in browser and more!
in anticipation of this huge update the people at Wordpress have published a trailer highlighting some of the cooler features:
“Check out some of the upcoming new features and design changes in this sneak preview video, including how to customize your dashboard, the new comment reply feature, the new navigation system, and the customizable posting screen.”
Zemanta is a London/Slovenia based startup who has built a platform that caters to online content producers, by contextually matching new stuff with existing content and consequently suggesting relevants third-party links, keywords, text, images, and even videos in a sidebar. Zemanta can be deployed on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers through a simple plug-in. You can demo the solution here.
Zemanta was one of the winners of Seedcamp 2007, and raised $ 1,5 million in seed funding shortly thereafter from The Accelerator Group and Eden Ventures. In today’s blog post, the company talks numbers:
“A year has passed since than and Zemanta has become a respectable force in the blogging world. We now support more than 10 platforms, numerous versions, serve suggestions from 2500 sources, professional images…everything you need to enhance your blogging experience. We touch several million readers each month and zemify 1000 posts each day. We invented the way how computer helps bloggers enhance blog posts, introduced quoting of the posts as a cross platform concept(Reblog), aggregation page of mostly suggested posts (Popular) and seen phenomenal response from the community.”
All in all, it’s great for a European company to get funding and acknowledgment from overseas, and certainly a high-profile one like Union Square Ventures. Zemanta definitely has a great future ahead. I haven’t used the service myself, but I believe my co-editors here at The Next Web blog are actually pretty big fans.
On Thursday, Zemanta plans to release a new version of the platform, shifting from being a general suggestion service to a personalized service. You’ll be able to upload your sources and limit the suggestion pool to your sources, you’ll be able to search through your Flickr account and point Zemanta to your Twitter account to get related blogs from your friends. The company has also redesigned its UI and streamlined the blogging experience.
Written on July 15, 2008 – 12:05 pm Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Matthew Mullenweg has just announced Wordpress 2.6, the latest update of this popular blogging platform. The release is almost a month ahead of schedule, and it seems that Wordpress is maturing into a full functioned content management system. These are our top three favorite new functions:
1. Revisions
Wordpress finally offers the ability to review post updates, something similar to what we already know from Wikipedia and Google docs. No more banging your head against the wall when you save a mistake by accident. For now, simply scroll down to the bottom of the admin panel, and review or compare the revisions to restore your work. But perhaps more obviously, the revision system is a version-control blessing to all multi-audited weblogs out there.
2. Gears integration
We are about to enter a internet world without the Digg effect! Gears, formally known as Google gears is a open source browser extension initiated by Google, and should allow faster speed for your blogging experience. In future developments, Wordpress should be able to periodically synchronize the local server data with the Gear network. Gear enabled blogs should be able to work, even when the server is not present. Cool new development and we can’t wait to see this implemented fully, for now, it’s just a way to store the cache of the javascript and CSS on the client’s computer.
3. Press this!
Finally, we noticed the reappearance of the “Press this!” button. The function makes it easier to blog about anything on the web, by simply clicking a bookmark link when you are on a page that you want to share, similar to Delicious and tumblr. The cool thing is that Wordpress made it really easy to add photo’s from the original article, and pull quotes from the article with ease! Add some text and you are ready to publish!
function; which allows editors to quickly post any webpage to their blog using a bookmark.
Check out the release video
Some other cool new functionalities
Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
Bulk management of plugins.
A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
Written on July 10, 2008 – 2:16 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When thinking about Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last April, first thing that comes to mind was the incredibly funny and witty keynote of Forbes editor Dan Lyons, better known as the Fake Steve Jobs. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, allow yourself to have a 25-minute break to have some good laughs and at the same time learning something really important about the traditional media and the digital revolution:
When listening to his keynote, I was surprised to find out the FSJ blog still existed. I assumed Lyons stopped after revealing his real identity - as parodies tend to get boring after a while. Fortunately, the gifted speaker and writer (in random order) announced yesterday that he will no longer portray the weird CEO and is thinking about starting a blog under his own name. I’m excited to hear that coming for a successful blogger who said the act of blogging “changed his life”. What kind of blog will he start? Will it be equally refreshing as his first one? The expectations are high mister Lyons, better be ready for that.
Written on January 8, 2009 – 2:14 pm
Bloggers VS Journalist. It is a popular discussion during Internet Conferences.
Written on January 8, 2009 – 1:54 am
Now on first glance, you may wonder what exactly is so exciting about “post by moderation”?? Surely this is something which should have been integrated from the beginning. Well, this is why it’s exciting - the feature is for “group blogs”. Still confused? Let me explain…
Written on December 24, 2008 – 11:05 am
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Written on September 15, 2008 – 11:51 am
Written on July 15, 2008 – 12:05 pm
Wordpress finally offers the ability to review post updates, something similar to what we already know from Wikipedia and Google docs. No more banging your head against the wall when you save a mistake by accident. For now, simply scroll down to the bottom of the admin panel, and review or compare the revisions to restore your work. But perhaps more obviously, the revision system is a version-control blessing to all multi-audited weblogs out there. 
We are about to enter a internet world without the Digg effect! Gears, formally known as Google gears is a open source browser extension initiated by Google, and should allow faster speed for your blogging experience. In future developments, Wordpress should be able to periodically synchronize the local server data with the Gear network. Gear enabled blogs should be able to work, even when the server is not present. Cool new development and we can’t wait to see this implemented fully, for now, it’s just a way to store the cache of the javascript and CSS on the client’s computer.
Finally, we noticed the reappearance of the “Press this!” button. The function makes it easier to blog about anything on the web, by simply clicking a bookmark link when you are on a page that you want to share, similar to Delicious and tumblr. The cool thing is that Wordpress made it really easy to add photo’s from the original article, and pull quotes from the article with ease! Add some text and you are ready to publish!
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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. (
