Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 5th January 2009
6 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When Jobs spread the word about his weight-loss this afternoon, Next Web editors Zee and Boris immediately started typing an article. Since they’re not sharing an office (Zee lives in London, Boris in Amsterdam) and both were utterly excited by the words from Mr. Apple himself, they didn’t see each other’s post. Thus sharp readers might have seen two posts about Jobs’ announcement on The Next Web (We deleted Boris’ post. At first he was devastated, but he’s feeling better now).
Anyhow, an hour or so later Boris called for my attention as he thought TechCrunch had made the same mistake. He noticed two posts about Jobs in his feedreader. One titled “Steve Responds to Rumors with a Steve-Note: I’m just Thin” and a second one called “Steve Jobs Explains His Weight Loss in Healthnote“. Did Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs pull the same trick as Zee and Boris?
Nah, it’s just Arrington force-feeding you some CrunchGear and MobileCrunch news. See the graphic Boris made to check out how TechCrunch’s 1.7 million RSS readers also get a load of John Biggs and the likes. Some of these articles also appear on the recently redesigned frontpage of TechCrunch.
This raises an interesting question: is it OK to show your readers posts from other blogs you own? Some readers are obviously not amused and speak of violating trust and all that. Others just ask the same question like me. I believe you can of course share news from your blog network, but doing without any notice or graphic hints is less stylish – if not confusing.
After all, you haven’t asked for Crunchgear posts, have you? Maybe you read Gizmodo for the latest gadget news because you like the tone of voice better. Who knows? Arrington doesn’t, that’s for sure. So there’s no motivation for him (except promotion) to shove it under your face.
Written on 31st December 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Earlier this week, Loic Le Meur asked for authority-based Twitter search. Jon Wheatly, a young coder from the UK, only needed 12 hours and numerous cups of coffee to make this possible. He developed Twitority, with which you can search within tweets from people with different levels of authority (based on how many followers you have). A hype was born. Almost every major tech blog picked it up.
Jon Wheatly
And now we report about it, but not without giving you some background. A story about a young enthusiast like Jon needs more than just a discussion about vanity and the value of Twitter authority.
In an email, Wheatly described the hype: “Things have been pretty crazy since we put the site online on Sunday. After Loic blogged about us the site started getting pick up by other bloggers and just snowballed from there.”
He also responds to some complaints about the somewhat slow search: “Because of the limitations of the Twitter API we were forced to hack around it and scrape the follower numbers for each user, per search that is performed. This is why each search takes so long. It really isn’t ideal but it’s the only way a third party can build any kind of “authority” based search. The server was really moaning last night but it survived, just.”
And what about the debate about the idea behind of Twitority?Erick Schonfeld for example, argues that not the number of followers matters, but how many times someone gets retweeted. Wheatly: “The debate is still raging about whether or not follower numbers are a good way to measure authority and honestly I don’t know. This was just something that Loic (and numerous other people) wanted so we decided to see if we could make it happen.”
Written on 16th October 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Erick Schonfeld wrote an excellent review about the Android G1 yesterday, saying that it couldn’t compete with the iPhone when it comes to the user interface. But he did mention a figure that isn’t correct, as he picked up the rumor from Motley Fool that 1.5 million were pre-sold. Of course, several hundred tech blogs picked this up.
One of them lived up to his journalistic duty, Marin Perez from InformationWeek. He contacted the mathematician behind the 1.5 million calculation:
I was curious as to how he got these figures and he gave me his rationale.
He cited a Cens.com article that said, “according to industry insiders, T-Mobile is planning to order a total of between 1.5 million and 2 million units of G1 with HTC in the near future, including 400,000 to 500,000 to be sold in the fourth quarter of this year.”
Then, Bylund cited T-Mobile selling out of pre-order units, and tripling the number of phones initially available. He then tripled the 500,000 number to get 1.5 million.
I’m glad he did, as almost every other tech blogger just hit copy/paste. Don’t believe everything you read on TechCrunch, Techmeme, or – for that matter – this blog. Because yeah, I’d have probably copied the 1.5 million figure as well.
So let’s all learn from Perez; check everything. Perez:
“This story just didn’t seem right to me, no matter how many times it went through the tech echo chamber.”
Point taken!
Written on 18th August 2008
1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
ReadWriteWeb reports that German tv star David Hasselhoff left MySpace and started his own space this week: Hoffspace. Surprisingly, the network already counts 10,000 users. For some reason, they weren’t scared by the hilarious welcome blog post by the Hoff:
In my travels round the world I have always been surprised that no matter where I go people recognize and know me, from Europe, Australia and India to the Philippines and the Zulu Nation in South Africa. This got me thinking… I realized that while two people from two entirely different countries and backgrounds may seem to have nothing in common, the only thing they might have in common is me… So I decided to start a network where people from across the world might come together and get a conversation started over me. Where it will lead, I don’t know but the world would be a better place if everyone talked a little more to each other…
The sad thing is that he doesn’t want to be funny at all. But, truth to be told, I have to give the man some credit though. In June I wrote about Hasselhoff’s attempt to create an Internet hype by starting his own lip-syncing competition. I wrote it works the other way around. You see, mr. Hasselhoff misses the point here that eighties stars are only cool when other people – not yourself – start a hype. Like Soocial did. This Dutch start-up uses David Hasselhoff as some sort of ridiculous mascot. It worked, ’cause Erick Schonfeld raved about it on TechCrunch.
Well, Hasselhoff has proved me wrong. Because this time, he started his own hype in the blogosphere: Hoffspace was already featured on TechMeme, ReadWriteWeb, and some other blogs. Hasselhoff and the tech scene, it remains a strange love affair.
Written on 28th March 2008
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
In only 5 days The Next Web Conference 2008 will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We will post short daily updates about speakers, initiatives and events here.
Erick Schonfeld
Formerly editor-at-large at Business 2.0 and currently Co-editor Techcrunch.com. We proudly present you the Next Web Conference 2008 moderator. He is a well known, respected and very connected journalist and blogger. His name is Erick Schonfeld.
If you don’t recognize the name right away don’t worry. Changes are you read his articles regularly but just didn’t notice his name before. He has been the co-editor of Techcrunch since September 2007 and has been contributing to the world famous blog (700.000+ RSS readers!) on a daily basis ever since.
Quoted from Techcrunch:
Erick has been covering startups and technology news for 14 years. At Business 2.0 he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, Next Net, which has nearly 50,000 RSS subscribers. He also does a lot of video work and hosts regular panels of industry luminaries called Disruptor Round Tables. Prior to Business 2.0, Erick was an editor-at-large for eCompany and a contributing editor for Fortune.
In 1999, Schonfeld won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the “best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30.” He appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, and NY1, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. Schonfeld graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.
Next to Erick Schonfeld we also have writers from Techcrunch France (Ouriel Ohayon) and TechCrunch UK & Ireland (Mike Butcher) who are also both media partners of The Next Web Conference. In other words: you will never get a better chance to meet representatives from every Techcrunch publication in one event. Maybe we should rename the conference “The Next Techcrunch Conference”? ;-)
Haven’t registered yet? Do it now before we are sold out…
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 
