Written on September 27, 2008 – 2:16 pm Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Many of you have been surprised by the sheer number of articles that we have been publishing on TheNextWeb recently so I’m going to let you into a little secret on how we managing it. It’s all due to a new piece of software that we oversaw a Techcrunch writer using (we wont say which one - see if you can guess) at the TC50 conference called Datapresser.
Industrial espionage is common in all businesses and we feel it is important in the blogsphere to do anything we can to “keep up with the Joneses”. Thus upon seeing TC using it and curious as to its functionality we forthwith conducted a due diligence investigation.
Once we set up this software, we were astonished to see that its function is to create articles for blogs automatically. Yes believe it or not, this tool uses the latest technology to create unique articles for Wordpress. All you have to do is select a topic of interest, add in a few links you would like to be included in the article and press go.
So how does it work? It uses something called Mad-Lib (pattern replacement) technology which works like this:
{|Custom|Suzy, Sally, John, Jacob}
{|Custom|is, was, will be, wants to be}
{|Custom|a Doctor, a Nurse, an Actor, an Acrobat}
Here are the results of that Mad-lib script
John wants to be a Nurse.
Or
Sally was a Doctor.
Or
Suzy wants to be an Acrobat.
Or
Jacob wants to be an Actor…etc.
Now what Datapresser does is take this process to a whole new level, not only do they have a massive database that you plug straight into which allows you to mix and match content until your hearts content but also they have a number of other tools which when used in conjunction with Datapresser, further enhance the uniqueness of the articles.
“Wellscripted content made by Datapresser can pass human inspection by Google or anyone else!”
It’s a numbers game
Many might ask what is the point of creating so many articles, well if you was a diligent TC reader you would have noticed the recent article on TC, entitled The More You Post, The Higher You Rank. See it’s a numbers game.
“The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog).”
Remix the top ten
So while we’re happy that our visitor numbers are rising rapidly we also realize the only hope we have in this race is to use the same software as the major players in order to keep the quantity equal to theirs. So for the last two weeks all the articles we’ve published have been made using it and we’ve had really good results, plus no one has even noticed!
Even this article your reading was made using Datapresser (with only a few tweaks as it tends to go on and on about itself).
What we have done is set it up to automatically read the rest of the main blogs in the morning, then Datapresser rehashes the theme of the top 10 articles and recompiles these into unique blog posts on the same topic. It’s bloody marvelous. It means that we can set it to publish 10 or even 20 articles a day while we sit back and got on with other work.
It’s what all the top blogs are doing these days but they’d never admit it, as once the cat is out of the bag everyone will be at it…
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 28, 2008 – 10:36 pm Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
I was kicking off my daily late-night feed reading as usual, by firing up Netvibes and opening up a bunch of blogs in new tabs, when a computer voice started reading a post from ReadWriteWeb out loud. Besides scaring the hell out of me, it took a while before I realized that the audio snippet actually came from this post on Center Networks and not RWW.
The article teaches us that Swiss-based Dixero has just raised 1,5 million euros for their feed-to-audio conversion technology, bringing their total funding to 3 million euros. Allen Stern from CN embedded a conversion as an example, which started playing automatically. So my first advice for the company if they want to put their fresh funding to good use: loose the autoplay feature, and loose it fast. Having said that, let’s take a look at what Dixero does.
Based in Zürich, Switzerland, Dixero enables you to aggregate your favorite RSS feeds into channels and ‘vocalize’ them, so you can actually listen to blog posts while you’re busy doing other stuff, or download them as podcasts for when you’re on the road (it works on both computers as mobile devices). There’s also some pre-defined channels users can tune into, e.g. the Technology Channel.
Dixero lets you choose between different voices (one male, two female) and lets you categorize blogs into multiple channels. There’s of course also a social component, which lets you share audio clips with your friends easily.
The current voices sound a bit creepy to me, much like HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (”Would you like to play a game of chess?“), and I know it’s a service that I won’t be using myself because I don’t see any added value that would improve my blog consuming experience in any way. But the voices are being worked on, according to the company, and who knows if I’m missing something here that you find incredibly useful for you. If that’s the case, be my guest in the comments and explain why you dig Dixero.
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 March 10, 2008 – 4:50 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every blog needs some light-hearted and fun posts once in a while. When writing for a Web 2.0 blog, chances are high these posts are geeky. So please don’t blame for posting this Cyborg Name Decoder tool, since the signature of this blog completely legitimizes it.
So here we go. Imagine my fellow bloggers were cyborgs, these would be their names:
I hope you guys all had your laughs, so I can go back to being a serious blogger now. Thank you.
Written on March 6, 2008 – 3:44 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might know, Meghan McCain - the daughter of the Republican presidential candidate - has a blog. So what, you probably think, it’s just a random PR thing. And you’re totally right. She even hired a photographer and an independent producer to give the blog a hip and professional look and feel. Together they form the blogettes.
Meghan loves the campaign of her father as well as music. Therefore she picks a ’song of the day’ and regularly posts playlists. You know you won’t find anything more shocking than that the daughter of a politician listens to a song called ‘the Angry Mob’. Though despite the boring an marketing minded content, the blog does reveal something shocking, at least for me.
Yesterday my parents hosted a BBQ at our cabin in Sedona, Arizona for the press who have been traveling with us on the campaign.
Excuse me? Journalists are having dinner with a presidential candidate? Am I that naive that I always thought journalists should be independent and not too cousy with politicians? Sure, when I was working at the United Nations I made sure that the vibe between me and a politician was ok, but we didn’t barbecue on the shore of the East River! The pictures of the laughing ‘press guys’, chilling with the pretty blond daughter of McCain make my old-fashioned romantic idea (I guess?) of journalism fall apart.
And so, without even the intention to actually reveal anything of the truth behind a presidential campaign, Meghan’s blog does surprise me. I wish every slick PR publication did that.
Written on March 4, 2008 – 9:56 am Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
Mixi, Japan’s biggest SNS and blog, has just announced that starting 1st of April they will amend the terms of use (Japanese only) to give Mixi complete ownership and ultimate control over user generated content.
This is big News in Japan with stories on all the biggest Japanese news sites (eg. Yahoo, Livedoor). This may be a game changer in several ways for SNS in Japan.
First we will find out if Japanese users really value the sanctity of their data. History tells us that it is actually not very high on the list of concerns when big companies are involved, but very high when you are dealing with small companies. Mixi being about as big as they come in the SNS world may not cause much of a stir, but if this hits the press enough, they may be in for a backlash and a change of priorities from the users.
Second is what Mixi will do with their new found data dictatorship. Could they start using your friend’s images to advertise to you, integrate advertising into user generated content just as Facebook tried to and received a lot of backlash? Could it be just a first step into censorship as they gear up for a push into China?
I will be keeping an eye on how this shapes up… when someone the size of Mixi makes a move like this it is bound to shape the way all the other players do business.
Written on February 27, 2008 – 10:05 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A lot has happened over the last few years on the web and it is not all coming from San Francisco. In Europe we have made great progress and a lot of European startups are taking the lead. With initiatives like OpenCoffee, conferences like LeWeb3, FOWA, DLD (and let’s not forget The Next Web Conference :) ) the European Internet scene is working on its come back.
We have highly skilled developers, we know how to do business, we speak multiple languages and are used to be working with different cultures (see Saul Klein’s writeup on ‘Why Europe can seed growth of its new stars’). So let’s celebrate all these great European startups!
Hold on to your braces, ’cause The Next Web Awards are coming! Together with fellow European bloggers TechCrunch France, TechCrunch UK, Loogic (Spain) and Frankwatching (Holland) we’re co-hosting these public awards for European* based technology companies for future accomplishments.
Why Europe? Next Web Blogger and of the initiators of The Next Web Conference Boris explains: “Europe has a great technology and entrepreneurial scene. A lot is happening in Europe, but most of the attention goes to Silicon Valley based companies. The Next Web Awards celebrates European startups and technology companies”.
So, I’ve made the announcement, now it’s up to you. Nominate your favorites on The Next Web Awards site before March 10. Actually, do it right away, why wait?
These are the categories:
Entertainment
Company
Social
Web Celeb
Weblog
Rookie of the year
On stage startup**
* Definition of European is in this case: all European countries according to this wikipedia page and Israel.
** 24 startups will do a 5 minute demo during the conference and they are automatically nominated for this category
As of March 11 the final nominees are announced and the website will be open for votes. The grand Award Ceremony will take place during The Next Web Conference on April 4 at 5pm.
By the way, this is the second time that The Next Web Awards are taking place. Last year 85.000 votes were counted in two weeks and amongst the proud winners were LinkedIn, OpenID, Tariq Krim, Youtube and Wikipedia.
Written on February 25, 2008 – 4:55 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some people say that blogging is soo two years ago, I dare to differ. Especially here in Europe, there are lot of opportunities. There still so much people who don’t even know what blog is. And that’s strange, considering the assumption that everybody has at least one hobby or passion. And somewhere, on the web, somebody is writing about that exact same hobby. Who wouldn’t want to read that?
Yet, blogs aren’t that user friendly for the not so web-minded people. How on earth do they find them? Let’s face it, Technorati is just too geeky for your 76-year old neighbor and the Google results are too cluttered. They just don’t even want to know what ‘tags’ or ‘trackbacks’ are.
Now there is Blogged.com, a clean-looking catalog for blogs. Mashable reports that ‘its primary topic is likely going to be the average web user that recognizes blogs too have a wealth of information across various topics’.
So imagine that your neighbor is into cooking, look how easy she can find some interesting blogs about this lovely activity:
Directories with easy interfaces that remind people of magazines and newspaper will the step to the digital world not too big, not even for the elderly. I believe initiatives like Blogged.com contribute to the revolution that is ahead of us. Namely the European mass adoption of the medium blog.
Written on February 16, 2008 – 1:08 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After spending two days in the city of love and buying Valentine’s presents, the wildest ideas about love pop into your mind. At least in my experience they do… so here’s one! On my way to Paris I read an article in my favorite newspaper that said it started a dating service. Nothing special, since every newspaper in the Netherlands has its own dating service. They were just a little later.
Starting a dating service as a newspaper makes sense if you think about it. You choose a newspaper because you feel most comfortable with its political signature, tone of voice, cultural supplement and of course its brand experience. The newspaper I read for example is aimed at a young cosmopolitan audience, discusses broad themes instead of just the hottest news and highlights interesting and semi-intellectual stuff to do. If I were looking for a girlfriend, I would definitely want a girl who has the same ideas about what’s important in life and the world. So the perfect girl for me would probably read the same newspaper.
That’s where the dating service comes in. I could just browse through profiles of girls, without worrying whether she open for semi-intellectual stuff of not. Makes perfect sense to me. I mean, somebody who reads The New York Times would never date anyone who started the day with The New York Post. It goes for magazines too, a FHM man doesn’t want a high-brow New Yorker reader to spend his life with. Right?
If you think of it that way, blogs could easily start dating services as well. They discuss a specific hobby, passion, business or sports team etcetera and differentiate from each other by using a different tone of voice and design. If you’re an eligible bachelor in London, it mustn’t be that hard to meet an attractive tech-minded girl (correct me if I’m wrong guys), yet when you live in Liverpool you might need some help finding one. Wouldn’t it be great if a TechCrunch UK dating service came to the rescue?
Moreover, blogs have a big advantage compared to newspapers since they allow interaction between readers. You can judge on beforehand whether you like his or hers opinion on certain matters. Want some diversity? Check out an article that discusses an important topic and see if he or she has as totally different view on things.
One doubt about dating on blogs, I’m not sure about the man/woman ratio though as male readers are probably still a majority. Anyway, let me try to give you an idea what I’m talking about, here are some stereotype readers. Feel free to drop your experiences in the comments.
TechCrunch Chick: she’s pretty straight-forward, would love to live in the Valley and is always looking for opportunities to come up with THE perfect business idea. And as no other, she knows money makes the world go round.
VentureBeat Gentleman: killer-guy, working his ass off and likes to cut through the chase. One you thing must know ladies, he checks the business news every 15 minutes.
Valleywag Queen: he/ she gossips the day round and has an radar for rumors. Great to drunk with, since he/she is a great story teller and knows how to crash a party. Don’t let your guard down though.
Mashable Man: Girls, you sure gonna love his elegant and charismatic appearance. Yet after a while, you might feel a bit neglected since he’s always busy with meeting friends and keeping social contacts intact.
ReadWriteWebWoman: Highly intelligent lady who likes to get to the bottom of things. Although her punctual and structured approach to life might start to get on you nerves.
Loogic Guapa: For all of you who are looking for that Spanish temper, the Loogic guapa is your chick. If only all her friends wouldn’t speak Spanish all the time.
Written on February 8, 2008 – 4:56 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A few weeks ago I interviewed Matt Colebourne. He’s the CEO of coComment, a service that makes it possible to keep track of all the comments you make and discussions you’re participating in. Today he captured the attention of 700 LIFT08 attendees when he spoke about the importance of social networking and conversations for companies and bloggers.
Colebourne is the kind of speaker that grabs your attention and won’t let go. “Who’s stressed?” he asked the audience in enthusiastic way, “Don’t worry, I’m here to make you feel good”. He then asked us to imagine that we’re the marketing director of a big brand. “You have a pleasant life, everybody thinks you’re brilliant.” Well, you can guess where this is going. In comes the angry visitor who leaves an ugly comment on the website. It gets picked up and the social media train is gathering steam. Before you know it, the comment ended up on the Digg frontpage. What happened?!
“Opinions are everywhere, people are saying what they want. Whether you like it or not. Trouble is here”, Colebourne said. “Markets ARE conversations, you can view that as trouble or you can engage, excite and use it yourself.” Some more one liners by Colebourne: “Listen to the good, the bad and the ugly” and “Interaction sometimes make your brand more memorable”. And his most important message: “You cannot control, keep talking and listening, don’t be scared”.
“You cannot control, keep talking and listening, don’t be scared”
So to sum it up, Colebourne urges companies and organizations to participate in online conversations, instead of running way from them. It’s a message that would do pretty well at a regular marketing event, yet I think that most LIFT08 visitors were already aware of this revolution. I mean, everybody has read the corporate blogging book Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble - who was sitting front row by the way.
Colebourne is a gifted speaker and I really like coComment, but next time I hope his presentation is inspirational because of the content itself, and not just for the way that he presents it.
Written on September 27, 2008 – 2:16 pm
Industrial espionage is common in all businesses and we feel it is important in the blogsphere to do anything we can to “keep up with the Joneses”. Thus upon seeing TC using it and curious as to its functionality we forthwith conducted a due diligence investigation. 
Written on July 28, 2008 – 10:36 pm
I was kicking off my daily late-night feed reading as usual, by firing up Netvibes and opening up a bunch of blogs in new tabs, when a computer voice started reading a post from ReadWriteWeb out loud. Besides scaring the hell out of me, it took a while before I realized that the audio snippet actually came from 
e between different voices (
Written on March 31, 2008 – 11:07 am
However, it remains interesting to create some sort of ranking. International marketing bloggers already have a top 150 list: 
Excuse me? Journalists are having dinner with a presidential candidate? Am I that naive that I always thought journalists should be independent and not too cousy with politicians? Sure, when I was working at the United Nations I made sure that the vibe between me and a politician was ok, but we didn’t barbecue on the shore of the East River! The pictures of the laughing ‘press guys’, chilling with the pretty blond daughter of McCain make my old-fashioned romantic idea (I guess?) of journalism fall apart.
Written on March 4, 2008 – 9:56 am
Colebourne is the kind of speaker that grabs your attention and won’t let go. “Who’s stressed?” he asked the audience in enthusiastic way, “Don’t worry, I’m here to make you feel good”. He then asked us to imagine that we’re the marketing director of a big brand. “You have a pleasant life, everybody thinks you’re brilliant.” Well, you can guess where this is going. In comes the angry visitor who leaves an ugly comment on the website. It gets picked up and the social media train is gathering steam. Before you know it, the comment ended up on the Digg frontpage. What happened?!
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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. (
