Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 29th June 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
A UK blogger has been cleared of charges relating to a story he wrote detailing the kidnap and murder of pop group Girls Aloud. Daryn Walker’s story, entitled ‘Girls (Scream) Aloud’ was published on a niche pornography site.
The Internet Watch Foundation, a UK organisation that monitors the web for offensive material, reported the story to the police and Walker was charged under the Obscene Publications Act in February 2008. Today he walked free. (more…)
Written on 26th June 2009
2 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
With news of Michael Jackson’s passing sinking in, the web has now recovered from the initial traffic surges it suffered as word first spread. As the blogosphere picks apart the way the story unfolded online, many are coming to the conclusion that the realtime web isn’t really the best place to get news accurately.
The first two sources to confirm Jackson’s death were online. TMZ and the LA Times suffered vast traffic surges that took them down, while Twitter (in between outages) was spreading misinformation about other celebrity deaths. Hours after the rumour began, people are still asking if Jeff Goldblum is dead (he isn’t).
So, when you can’t rely on the internet, TV’s the place to go right? Sure TV news is always there and it’s more careful with its facts; is it really any more useful though? Pictures for Sad Children makes a great point in this cartoon. The internet maybe unreliable, but at least it says something!
Written on 18th June 2009
3 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Google is reportedly set to launch a new way to browse its News service. Flipper will let you view the results of your searches in a magazine format. This more visual way to browse the news should make it quicker to get a feel for which stories you want to read. It should be a natural format for quick scanning on a touchscreen device like the iPhone.
It’s not only Google News that needs an overhaul though. Another important search tool from Mountain View is in desperate need of some TLC. Over the past few months Google Blog Search has gone from being a useful resource for scanning the state of the blogoshere to difficult-to-navigate bucket of spam blogs and automatically generated Delicious link lists.
If you’re searching for what blogs are saying about a particular subject you need to cut out all the spam and automated nonsense and just get down to what matters – original content, indexed quickly. It’s unclear why it’s happened but Google Blog Search is now longer fit for purpose.
Nearly 24 hours ago here at The Next Web we published a story called “Stop Hating on IE6! You’ll hurt its feelings!” You’d think Google would have indexed it by now? Apparently not. A search for the phrase “Stop hating on IE6″ returns four results – all of them contain references to our post but none of them are the actual post. In fact, the references to the orginal post are from people’s Twitter streams, embedded in their blogs.
So, if you want to find a post in Google Blog Search you’ll have to go via someone’s tweet, via their own blog. Rival blog searcher Twingly finds the original post straight away.
While Flipper looks like a nice new way to use Google’s existing search technology, ta search technology that appears to be crumbling away.
Google is reportedly set to launch a new way to browse its News service. Flipper will let you view the results of your searches in a magazine format. This more visual way to browse the news should make it quicker to get a feel for which stories you want to read. It should be a natural format for quick scanning on a touchscreen device like the iPhone, too.
It’s not only Google News that needs an overhaul though. Another important search tool from Mountain View is in desperate need of some TLC. Over the past few months Google Blog Search has gone from being a useful resource for scanning the state of the blogoshere to difficult-to-navigate bucket of spam blogs and automatically generated Delicious link lists.
(more…)
Written on 7th May 2009
18 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
![150+ of the most popular blogs and news sites about the WorldWideWeb [The OPML files]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/3382977725_519a106d2a_b-300x200.jpg "3382977725_519a106d2a_b")
It’s no secret we completely disagree regarding the recent discussions over the death of RSS and as a commitment to it, we’re starting a new series titled
The OPML files.
The series will feature lists of the most respected and popular blogs & sites in various different categories, and to make things easier for you – we’ve done the hard work and include an OPML file for each list.
What is an OPML file?
See here for full details, but all you really need to know is that its the file that RSS readers use when exporting and importing RSS feeds.
Today, we feel its appropriate to start with Web/Tech Blogs.
How did we compile each list? Frankly, research. For each industry the mechanism and sources are going to be different. For tech blogs for example, we’ve looked at traffic, Technorati, Digg, Techmeme, recommendations and other lists.
Ok, so lets get started:
Download OPML file here and below are the list of the sites included and their RSS feeds:
Written on 24th April 2009
15 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
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…
Written on 27th March 2009
5 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, 200 mobile phones were lost on the Washington DC Metro alone. A free lost-and-found service for your objects, called simply SendMeHome.com plans to reunite you with your precious objects by allowing you to register them, label them, and have the finder easily contact you to return the object. Great, and a must for any portable device. But there’s more…
What is more intriguing about SendMeHome.com is that it also invites you to send your objects on journeys, track their progress on a map, and have each person who encounters the object tell their story. This section of their site is simply called ‘Stories’.
The site has simple, well written descriptions and instructions:—
Stories gives you a rich multimedia, multi-author blog for any item that you register with SendMeHome.com. This gives you a way to track and share the life or journey of your item. You can tell the story of any item, you can even register yourself!
Stories helps you to promote a cause, promote yourself, connect with others who share your interests, or just create a cool story. We hope you’ll be able to collaborate with new, interesting, and like-minded people who you would have otherwise never met.
Some examples include:—
- A disposable camera tied to random benches with instructions to capture the events of a single day.
- A frying pan used to collect the recipes and stories of bacon lovers everywhere
- An Oscar statuette making its way around LA with actors promoting themselves with 3-minute monologues
- A soft drink can that documents the life of every startup it passes through on its way to Bill Gates
Joining the service, aside from letting you register your objects, also allows you to follow stories, and get updates when there’s a new chapter in a story you are following.
Sendmehome has just announced a Facebook Application, Friend Connect integration, and has a $1000 prize for the best SendMeHome Story.
SendMeHome.com is fun, viral, creative, useful, and sets a smile on the face of everyone who comes across it. The design’s a little clunky, but the essential ingredients are there for growth, because of the simple utility value, and the huge fun element.
World Peace through Wandering Items.
Written on 24th March 2009
3 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
A self hosted blog can bring great control and customization options, however for many of us, it also brings hassle. Thankfully there are plenty of hosted options out there that make launching, writing and managing a blog, a piece of cake.
RoyalPingdom monitored all major blogging platforms for a 4 month period, aiming to discover the most reliable – in terms of uptime – services out there.
The services were tested over the last four months and each services homepage was checked every minute from two different locations. They were judged to be ‘down’ whenever the site wouldn’t load within 30 seconds or returned an error code.
In all fairness, the uptime for most of the services is impressive, particularly with the most popular blogging services backed by major players; Typepad, Blogger and Wordpress. The two most notable downtimes were 13h 50m and 1d 12h from LiveJournal and Blog.com respectively.
Blog.com had a particularly January period which account for the considerably poor downtime.
As RoyalPingdom point out, it’s interesting to note that both TypePad and Vox.com, share considerably different uptime figures despite being owned by the same company, SixApart.
It’s worthwhile noting that the survey monitored just the homepages of each service rather than every individual blog hosted by it. However, we can safely assume if the homepage is down, the rest of the site is likely to be too.
Written on 21st March 2009
1 COMMENT
Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
If you missed out previously, we call this segment the Interestingness!. Where in, we’ll cover intriguing articles from across the web which are ‘Hot wire’ and ‘Eye Catchers’.
Here we go with this week’s Interestingness!
Let us know your views about this segment and feel free to share links to interesting articles you have come across in the comments. Just make sure it has interestingness!
[ Photo Credit ]
Written on 17th March 2009
6 COMMENTS
Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
If you missed out last week, here is an experimental segment, we call it the Interestingness!. Where in, we’ll cover intriguing articles from across the web which are ‘Hot wire’ and ‘Eye Catchers’.
Here we go with this week’s Interestingness!
Let us know your views about this segment and feel free to share links to interesting articles you have come across in the comments. Just make sure it has interestingness!
[ Photo Credit ]
Written on 10th March 2009
2 COMMENTS
Srikanth AD, Web Designer, Search Engine Optimizer and Google Devotee
At The Next Web, we have an ongoing quest to make your digital life easier and more interesting by updating you regularly with startup reviews, useful software, and innovative internet tools and services.
Here is an experimental segment, we call it the Interestingness!. Here, we’ll cover intriguing articles from across the web which are ‘Hot wire’ and ‘Eye Catchers’.
Here we go with Interestingness!
Let us know your views about this new segment and feel free to share links to interesting articles you have come across in the comments. Just make sure it has interestingness!
[Photo Credit]
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 off, the future of the Web. (More info 
