Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 21st May 2009
19 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
With a personal blog, a Flickr account and Twitter you could say that my online identity is all over the place.
My blog does show my last 5 tweets and a random selection of Flickr photos but the main thing you notice when you visit it is that I haven’t been regularly blogging lately. IT simply isn’t a good representation of all my activities online. It looks like we are all waiting for a new format to bring all our online content together in one place.
Is FriendFeed the solution?
The next version of WordPress maybe?
Will Facebook solve our problems by integrating all?
Nobody really knows.
Amplifeeder (’a distributed social activity aggregator’) hopes to offer a solution to at least combine all your feeds in one screen. You could describe it as a meta search engine for your own stuff. It pulls data from FriendFeed, Twitter, Flickr, your blog, any RSS feed and a few other sources and displays them on one page. Voila; your own Lifestream.
As a test I have set-up my own Lifestream page at http://boris.amplifeeder.com/
As you can see it all works just fine. Not surprisingly as the technology to pull in feeds is not very complicated. Amplifeeder offers an easy to use Dashboard where you can choose different templates and adjust your settings. It even shows me some basic stats so I know what I’m spending too much time on.
Conclusion: I don’t see myself abandoning my blog OR putting the address of my Lifestream on my business cards on anything like that. But Amplifeeder is a nice effort to solve the problem of scattered personal content.
The downside? you’ll need to have access to a server to install this bad boy.
The good news? Your in complete control.
You have nothing to lose by setting up your own Lifestream there so why not give it a try?
Written on 11th November 2008
1 COMMENT
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
The Google ‘Reader team’ has announced a pretty cool feature for people interested in the rest of the world: automatic translation in Google Reader!
The integration of Google Translate into Google Reader was done by Brett Bavar, a Google Employee, as part of a 20% project. As you might know Google employees (only in the US) can spend 20% of their time on products and services of their own choosing.
The new integrated translation tools allow you to follow any blog in Google Reader which will then be translated on-the-fly, in your reader.
We all know that computer translated texts don’t always make sense. This is especially true for personal blogs which often use their own style, slang and typos which make it extremely hard to translate for someone or something not familiar with the subject.
Still, it is pretty cool to be able to read blogs in Japanese, Spanish and Chinese from within your Google Reader. If you don’t speak or read English now is your chance to also follow this blog in your own language. Or, as Google would say:
Chinese:
如果你不说话或阅读英语现在是你的变化也遵循这一博客在自己的语言。
Japanese:
話せない場合や英語を読む今も自分の言葉でこのブログに変更されています。
Spanish:
Si usted no habla Inglés o leer ahora es el cambio a seguir también este blog en su propio idioma.
Swedish:
Om du inte talar eller läser engelska är nu din förändring för att också följa den här bloggen på ditt eget språk.
Polish:
Jeśli nie rozmawiać lub czytać angielskie teraz jest również zmiana tego bloga w swoim własnym języku.
Russian:
Если не говорить или читать Английский сейчас ваши изменения, также последуют этому блогу в вашем родном языке.
Arabic:
إذا كنت لا يتكلم أو يقرأ الانجليزية الخاص بك الآن هو تغيير أيضا لمتابعة هذا بلوق في لغتك الأم.
Written on 29th July 2008
3 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent
Rss is still getting more important for many bloggers, as co-blogger Boris update our blog for RSS last May:
“Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that.”
Since the updates, subscribers on thenextweb have been increasing tremendously! (subscribe here if you haven’t done allready) Here at TheNextWeb office we have been trying out different programs to read the feeds of other sites, and today I found one on Techcrunch with a new time saving approach:
Open source program Apprise allows users to not only read, but also share news directly from your RSS reader. The project is developed by Christian Cantrell, an Adobe Employee and editor on WatchReport.
The reader is based on Adobe Air, users can simply add and aggregate feeds. Its not world changing, but I believe this is the first RSS reader that can share your articles this easy.
(more…)
Written on 20th May 2008
6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
My personal blog attracts between 150 and 250 visitors a day but has more than 800 Feedburner subscribers. This is a fact that I discovered today and it might have some impact on how I blog. Most bloggers spend a lot of time optimizing for search engine and making sure their websites look good.
Here at the Next Web Blog we always look for nice illustrations to go with our posts because we know people like to look at nicely formatted posts. In general I write my posts with a preview window open next to it so I can see how the text flows around the images and what goes below and above ‘the fold’.
What I don’t do is optimize for RSS. As I have written before in a post title RSS Awareness Day: “According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it”. So why bother spending too much time on it?
Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that. One example are the images. The image I used here is scaled down a bit in html and placed on the right with a CSS class. All of that is ignored in RSS. That means that if you read this post via your RSS reader the image is huge and displayed right on top of the article.
With more and more traffic going straight to RSS it makes sense to start optimizing for it. I want a Wordpress plugin that adds a ‘preview this post’ button so I can preview it in both the browser AND in RSS readers.
Then we get to the issue of cross platform compatibility. You might have your HTML and CSS working fine in Explorer and Firefox on Window and Macintosh and Linux but how does it look in Google Reader? Or My Yahoo? And have you checked NetNewsWire on a Mac VS NewsGator on Windows?
As RSS becomes more popular this becomes an aspect of webdesign we can no longer ignore…
Written on 1st May 2008
7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
For those people who DO know what RSS is and use it it is hard to imagine that most people don’t. According to some research (Pew Internet & Yahoo) only 12% of all people are aware of RSS and less than 4% have knowingly used it.
Although I can imagine that most of our readers (with an interest in The Next Web) do know about RSS I still wanted to tell you about the phenomena since today is official RSS Awareness day.
According to WikiPedia “RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.”
But maybe this video (titled “RSS in Plain English”) is more interesting to watch:
As you can see in the video, before you start subscribing to the RSS feeds of your favorite sites you will sign-up for (or download) a RSS reader. Try Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes.
Once you have your RSS reader working you can subscribe to RSS feeds by clicking the RSS icon on a website or in your browser url field. Most modern web browsers already identify RSS feeds, so you will be able to see the RSS icon. Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed!
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 
