Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on November 25, 2008 – 9:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday, I reported about a possible acquisition of Forbes by Russian investment fund ONIXEM Group. Rumors were stirred by an article from Russian newspaper Trud and spread rapidly through the blogosphere as soon as Yakov from the Quintura blog translated the article. With exciting though vague news like that, somebody needs to do some fact checking. Yet where to start?
Whenever something newsworthy occurs concerning start-ups, an email to its founder is quickly sent. But who do you contact when the news concerns major parties like Forbes and the ONIXEM Group? Why would they care to answer the call of a blogger?
Well-connected tech blogosphere
Om Malik
Luckily, the tech blogosphere as a whole is well connected. There’s always someone with an old friend at the right company. In the case of Forbes and its Russian connection, this “someone” turned out to be Om Malik.
An investor in Forbes
The famous tech blogger used to work at Forbes and sent a line to an old Forbes connection yesterday:
[..] I emailed Roger McNamee, who heads up Elevation Partners and is an investor in Forbes. His intervention got me a quick response. “Forbes absolutely denies this rumor, and has no knowledge of the source,” Forbes said in an emailed statement. “Forbes Russia is also not for sale to the ONEXIM group.”
Crowd sourcing fact checking
Behold the power of many. The tech blogosphere crowd sources its fact checking and even unravels mysteries about a Russian playboy and his desire to acquire a traditional American publishing house.
Photo credit: Thomas Hawk
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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 2, 2008 – 1:10 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Ok, so I won’t start complaining about the Techmeme echo chamber or anything like that. I don’t even feel that way about the tech news aggregator. I just want to show how excited the blogosphere is about Google’s initiative to enter the browser market. Or.., no, let me make one suggestions. Maybe Techmeme should consider to use doodles - like Google does - as well.
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.
Written on February 6, 2008 – 6:42 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Technorati currently tracks 112.8 million blogs, an incredible number but also rather abstract. A great many blogs are dead and most are written in a language, most of us don’t understand. Korean, Chinese, Japanese - to name a few. Fact is though that there’s overwhelming amount of blogposts to read. What we see more and more though is a filtering and professionalizing process in the blogosphere. An increasing number of people seems to be joining blog collectives and we’re all getting more serious about this new style of writing.
This has advantages: quality is increasing, people check their facts more often and the journalistic approach (interviews, analysis) is getting more common. Just giving your opinion isn’t good enough anymore. Readers want arguments and a (wo)man with a vision.
A big disadvantage that comes with this development is that the blogosphere might get a bit boring. We think about what we post for a long time. Recently, problogger Darren Rowse summed up 13 questions you have to answer before you post an article. Of course, this increases the quality of post yet thinking processes like this might lead to over-considered articles, in which the spontaneity and guts are gone. I mean, where are the rebels in professional blogging? Don’t we all read Arrington for his no-mercy approach?
Good news for everybody who feels the same way like I do, Utterz is about to bring the excitement back in blogging. It’s a service that allows you to instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas with your mobile. Sort of like an extended Twitter, with more media-types. Utterz mashes the voice, video, pictures and text you call or send in together and creates an ‘Utter’ that can immediately update your existing web pages on sites like Blogger, WordPress, Facebook, LiveJournal and MySpace. Next Web Tipr from the UK David Petherick recommended this service to me, check out his profile at Utterz.
Although Wordpress (amongst others) already allows you to send in messages via email, there wasn’t yet a service who made impulsive blogging this easy. Utterz lowers the barrier for bloggers to send in material, which might lead to more raw and interesting material. When you don’t have time for all the regular considerations, something beautiful or exciting might slip through that normally wouldn’t. That will for sure make the problogosphere more edgy and diverse.
[WebTipr: David Petherick, United Kingdom]
blogosphere, crowd sourcing, Elevation Partners, Forbes, Forbes Russia, Om Malik, Quintura, Roger McNamee, russia
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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. (
