Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 29th April 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
I’d like to first come clean and establish one important fact, I am not a Flickr fan. Fret not however, I’m not going to launch into a rant about the popular photo sharing site just yet, I’ll save that for another post.
Irrespective of my Flickr qualms, I do have a pro account and I accept (for now) it’s here to stay, and the more tools available to make the most out of it, the better. Today, a jewel of an app fell into my lap (via Smoking Apples), a desktop Flickr app called flickery. The application makes browsing, navigating, sharing and utilizing Flickr, a far less troublesome process.
Browsing
With a familiar two pane window, you can browse your photo stream, favorites, contacts recent photos and groups as if the photos were stored locally. Photos can be viewed larger by pressing the space bar, or in gorgeous full screen by pressing cmd-enter. You can download images to your desktop or add them directly to iPhoto via a click of a button. Sharing photos is just as easy, select the photos you’d like to share and you can share them via email, iChat or Twitter.
Searching photos is also straight forward, but limited to 30 and can’t be ordered by ‘interestingness’. You can search your own photos with ease, as well as other selected users.
(more…)
Written on 29th April 2009
2 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Not only did Flickr member Norby slice up a photo into six squares but he even went so far as to figure out how to crop each photo to show correctly when spaced apart as they are! Genius.
via Gizmodo
Written on 6th April 2009
3 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
A neat little tool from the guys at Idée, makers of the image search engine TinEye. As slick as we’ve come to expect from the developers, Multicolr simply lets you search Flickr images for specific colours. You can select up to 10 colors from a palette of 120 different shades, and to enhance one particular colour over another, simply select it twice.
Try it out yourself here.
Written on 30th March 2009
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Found this one on Flickr. Made by Bjarne P Tveskov from Denmark. As he explains: “Probably the most loved error message in the world”.
The original illustration was made by Yiying Lu. It became famous when Twitter started using it to show the service was having problems handling traffic. More info about the most famous digital whale.
Imagine for a moment that your own service or company would be so popular that users started composing songs about it and making these kind of artworks, of your error messages?
We can only dream…
Written on 4th March 2009
6 COMMENTS
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
The average site for a popular consumer product is:
A. Slick with a high level of ‘production values’.
B. Made in flash.
C. About as socially engaging as a log.
Skittles changes all that in one go by essentially giving up on having a site of its own. If you go to skittles.com you see a realtime Twitter search for “skittles.” All that is left from the old corporate branded experience is a small widget-like navigator in the right hand corner.
If you click “videos” it goes to Skittles’ Youtube page, if you click “images” it directs you to a Flickr search, “products” is the Skittles Wikipedia article and clicking “friends” will take you to the skittles fan page on Facebook. This breaks with the tradition of consumer products with boring mass sites that feel like generic dance clubs -I’m looking at you Pepsi. Skittles have decided that the best online experience is one created by its own customers.
Predictably the Twitterati went wild after discovering that any tweet mentioning “skittles” would make it the new Skittles front page and it was inundated with tweets like:
mobob: #skittles is doing a very nifty thing, but i’m still not going to eat them, they always tasted way too much like rocks.
shehulk123: All the skittles talk on twitter today makes me want to go out and taste the rainbow.
brianboyko: @poneal - so… skittles gets people to talk about skittles on twitter by showing people talking about skittles on twitter. I don’t get it.
mpk: @obra you are way out of date on today’s fast-moving Internet. That Skittlesthing is *so* six hours ago.
Many have said that Skittles is making a mistake opening itself up to the worst impulses of the Web. They should ask themselves if any other consumer product has managed to get this level of attention online, ever.
Kudos to Skittles for leading the way!
Update:
So Skittles now defaults to the Wikipedia page for Skittles (yesterday it was their Facebook fan page). It seems to me that they are rotating through their different profiles, either as part of a strategy or just trying to see what achieves better customer interaction. To see the Twitter live search now click “chatter”. But the question remains; when will we see some Digg love?
Written on 16th January 2009
7 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Flickr My Background is a neat little tool which checks your Flickr account every hour for uploads to your Flickr account and uses the latest photo as your Twitter background.
I’ve tried it out and it definitely works well however you may need to set your custom background image by going to your Twitter design settings page, click on “Change background image”, then click on the image box that appears. Also, due to a bug in twitter, you’ll need check off ’tile background’ before clicking save. You can always un-tile it later.
Written on 19th December 2008
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
♬ ‘Tis the Season, fa la la la la, la la la laaa, for aster eggs on the web. ♫
♪ Fa la la la la visit Flickr, and la la la la la go to any photo. ♪
♬ Then add “?snow=1″ to the end of the url. ♬
♫ Sit back and fa la la relax.. ♪
Example:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thenextweb/3115017159/?snow=1
And there is more! Add a note to a photo with the text “ho ho ho beard” or “ho ho ho hat” (no quotes) to add a re-sizable hat or beard to any photo.
Like Faye (my daughter) in this example.
Written on 17th December 2008
1 COMMENT
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
Written by Casper Oppenhuis de Jong
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is like a tweet-up with the Scobles, Kawasakis and Calacanises of the real world. This annual get-together in the Swiss Alps brings together the sassiest elite of business, politics, journalism and intelligentsia to talk about the world’s most pressing issues.
Experienced journalist & blogger Thomas Crampton reported this week that the WEF (hosted in Davos, Switzerland: therefore often referred to as Davos) will use a refreshing new social media strategy to gain attention. He had the chance to interview Matthias Luefkens, the man behind the 2.0 activities of the WEF.
A glance at WEF’s wiki shows us this:
All plenary debates from Davos are also available on YouTube, pictures are available for free at Flickr and the key quotes are available on Twitter. In 2007 the Forum opened pages on social media platforms such as MySpace and Facebook. At the Annual Meeting 2009 the Forum invites the general public to participate in the Davos Debates on YouTube allowing one user to attend the Annual Meeting in person. In 2008 the Davos Question on YouTube allowed YouTube users to interact with the world leaders gathered in Davos who were encouraged to reply from a YouTube Video Corner at the congress centre. In 2008 press conferences are live streamed on Qik and Mogulus allowing anyone to put questions to the speakers. In 2006 and 2007 selected participants were interviewed in, and the closing session was streamed into, Reuters’ auditorium in Second Life.
These services in itself are nothing new in the tech community. But the fact that a conference like Davos – with the biggest players in the world – chooses to embrace these social media services seems like a major step. Plus, every soul with a camera and access to YouTube now has a shot at joining the lads and birds in the Alps!
Answer one of these questions and you’re in:
- Are you confident that global growth will be restored in 2009?
- Will the environment lose out to the economy in 2009?
- Will the Obama administration improve the state of the world in 2009?
- Should company executives have a code of ethics similar to doctors and lawyers?
Is this finally Politics & International Relations 2.0.1?
Written on 27th November 2008
6 COMMENTS
Paul Vereijken, Next Web Journalism & Media editor
You don’t need to be a big news corporation like CNN or BBC to cover breaking news. Dutch journalism students Loek Essers and Peter van der Ploeg proved that last night. The two used live blogging tool CoverItLive to cover the terrorist attack in India.
Twitter
Loek and Peter started their live blog by adding some breaking news Twitter feeds. They added CNN, BBC and BreakingNewsOn. To enrich the coverage they posted some news themselves and added tweets of Twitter users in Mumbai. Later on the students found out that Indian news channel IBN was the source of most off the coverage news corporations like CNN used. IBN posted photo’s and video’s on their website which Loek and Peter embedded on their live blog. Photo’s posted on Flickr were shown on the live blog too.
Dutch newspaper
Journalism students Loek and Peter showed how easy the web and (live) blogging made it to cover breaking news. And although the two started their live blog as an experiment they got rewarded. Dutch free newspaper De Pers used the live blog on their website.
Written on 7th January 2009
There’s a small digital subculture emerging around this app, with heroes like
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 
