Written on 15th May 2009
2 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Inspired by Kevin Rose and Addison Kowalski’s ‘WeFollow’ Twitter directory, Tumblr have launched their own – remarkably similar – Tumblr directory.
The concept is almost identical. Decide on three tags your tumbleblog fits into (eg. music, photography, design), complete the form and that’s all there is to it.
The blogs are order by ‘tumblarity’ (popularity), and I must admit I’m rather impressed with the number of subscribers some of the tumblr’s have.
Tumblr founder David Karp points that the directory will be in beta for approximately two week and until then you’ll only be able to select two tags from their current selection.
Here is an interesting point by Perry Belcher. He takes a look at a few top Twitter users such as Kevin Rose and Guy Kawasaki. Kevin has 78,112 followers but only follows 121 people back. Guy has 35,263 followers and follows 31,934 people back. Perry argues that Kevin isn’t using SocialMedia but SoloMedia by ignoring 99% of his followers.
You could also argue that following 70.000 people is similar to following nobody. If you let everybody talk at you at the same time you simply aren’t hearing anybody.
So what do you think? What is the perfect Follower/Following ration? What is the maximum amount of people you could follow with Twitter still being useful? Am I a Twitter Snob? Are you a Twitter snob or a Twitter Socialist?
Everything is for sale if you pay the right price, right? Well, not Digg according to Jay Adelson who spoke with BusinessWeek recently. Digg’s new focus lies on becoming profitable as soon as possible. That of course is the right thing to say if you want to be bought.
On the other hand; Digg has reportedly been shopping itself around for years and rumors regularly surfaced about an impending sale. That sale never materialized and it could just be that Digg is running out of potential buyers. With the current state of the economy it makes a lot of sense to focus on revenues instead of an exit. Because it is common sense AND makes you more interesting for potential buyers.
Here are some of the new features Digg wants to add to increase traffic and revenue:
sell ads on its RSS feeds
keep costs reasonable
focus more on the top-line revenue
increase engagement on the site (by introducing new features)
make Digg more social
a revamped version of its search engine to offer more relevant search advertisements.
International expansion by acquiring local Digg clones
Jay mentions there is ”probably a list of 15 to 20 things we want to do” in the following year. All to increase user interaction and thereby pageviews and revenue.
According to Businessweek, in September, Jay said it had tripled revenues over the last year. In 2009, Adelson expects “another tripling if not more.” Earlier this year, Adelson wanted to reach profitability within two years. Now, he says, “it will hopefully happen within a year”.
Kevin Rose kicked off the Future of Web Apps Conference in London this morning, on the topic “The Future of News”. He started out by asking several broad ‘unanswered questions’, which he went on to detail in his keynote.
How do we create an experience YOU enjoy?
How can it get better with your participation?
How can we empower people to share information with people that want that information?
How can we improve the conversation?
Kevin described the gap he wanted Digg to fill as being placed between the filters of people you know, and an unfiltered mass audience. This gap, said Rose, would be filled by Digg in future with its recommendation engine, providing an intersection of your news, and news from ‘diggers like you’.
Digg’s traffic has grown by over 40% since July with the recommendation engine being the fuel for this, and they now plan to open up their taxonomy to allow dynamic grouping – the aim with this is to promote conversation amongst similar users.
Thus, a group can ‘reject’ a spammer or someone who is interrupting, and include those who make valuable contributions. In this way, an individual can ’show their impact’ to other users – as you Digg, it shows you the number of people like you who, in a dynamic group, you are sharing this with, or the number whom you are ‘denying’ seeing the story if you are ‘burying’ things you don’t think deserve an airing. Nice tool – why would you want to disappoint 3,421 people like yourself?
Digg also want to be a conduit to other places, like Twitter, Facebook etcetera. They are also developing and extending the recommendation API and tools for publishers. My immediate thought was that the publishers might welcome this, but it would depend who was branding (or monetising) the end delivery to the consumer.
Responding to questions at the end of his presentation, Rose revealed that Digg has plans to develop internationally, with Rose saying this will be a big initiative next year. One big reason for taking their last round of funding was expanding internationally to take on the local ‘Digg clones’ in the likes of Germany and Spain.”We’ll be moving servers overseas, and by Q4 2009, we will be addressing international markets.”
So watch out, looks like the Diggers will be the future of news. So, please Digg this story…
Sun, promoting their excellent free Startup Essentials programme, gave Tactile a stand in the Expo Space – Start Up Community, a delegate pass, an expo pass and a listing on the FOWA site. Not content with this generosity, they also awarded a runner-up prize to ‘Shopping without searching’ startup Veedow, who win space on the Sun Lounge to demo their new version to be launched at Future of Web Apps. (Veedow are hiring, by the way.)
Next week, Sun are running a competition to win full conference tickets worth £495 to Future of Web Apps, and also are offering startups who join Startup Essentials, and use the ref code (sssch) FOWA08DSC, a code for 15% off FOWA Conference passes and free EXPO pass tickets, so keep an eye on their blog.
The line-up at FOWA’08 includes Jason Calcanis, Kevin Rose, Kathy Sierra, Tim Bray, Blaine Cook and David Recordon, and FOWA Expo is a great opportunity to see what’s new, and what’s going to be next in the web. Our friends from Diggnation, who presented their show live from the Next Web Conference 2008 in Amsterdam back in April will also be presenting a live Diggnation show from FOWA – always an event to look forward to.
So far, I haven’t reported about the whole Nano buzz. Kevin Rose’s guesses, the sneering reactions from the blogosphere, the “Let’s Rock” invitation from Apple and the leaked photos: it’s all one big joke to me. And although a lot of Apple fanboys seem to think about it as matter of life and death, there are actually some who seem to agree with me. Like Lonnie Lazar from Cult of Mac. He created a Keynote bingo card to keep all the attendees at the Yerba Buena Center entertained. Cool move! After all, it was a success with Leah Culver at Supernova. So here’s my plan of action.
Let’s vote Lazar’s post to Digg’s frontpage (click) to get it under the attention of all the fanboys out there.
Let one of these fanboys create an bingo app (that actually generates different cards)
Install this thing en masse, and start touching away during the Stevenote.
Here’s the iPhone app Stevenote Bingo mock-up
It took me way too long to design this, but hey, I gotta give you a good idea of the app I have in my mind.
Ok, so the phrases are displayed as phone keys. Click one and it transforms into a light-blue button. If you want to join a world-wide competition, type in your username and click “join”. The app can be used for every Stevenote to come, but this obviously is the one for the “Let’s Rock” edition. If you and your friends are bored, you can always choose the first iPhone keynote and watch it on the Apple website. After the click you can see what happens when you have bingo (nothing much actually). (more…)
September is suddenly here, and I, for one, have been looking forward in my diary to see what key events are taking place that I should attend – and The Future of Web Apps Expo, in London, October 8-10, certainly looks like a must.
The line-up of speakers includes Jason Calcanis, Kevin Rose, Kathy Sierra, Tim Bray, Blaine Cook and David Recordon, and FOWA Expo is a great opportunity to see what’s new, and what’s going to be next in the web. Our friends from Diggnation, who presented their show live from the Next Web Conference 2008 in Amsterdam back in April will also be presenting a live Diggnation show from FOWA – always an event to look forward to.
UK Startups: Win a stand at FOWA ‘08 with Sun
As I was checking out this show’s details today, I got a tweet from Stewart Townsend of Sun Microsystems – he’s just announced a competition for UK startups to win an exhibition package worth £2500 with a stand in the Expo Space – Start Up Community, a delegate pass, an expo pass and a listing on the FOWA site. Nice.
Even if you’re not a winner in the competition, the Sun Startup Essentials programme has some really nice features, such as technical support, special discounts on Sun hardware, PR opportunities, invitations to special networking events, special offers, and introductions to VCs/Angel Funds. The eleigibility is fairly flexible too – if you’re a UK business trading for less than six years, and have fewer than 150 employees – you’re a startup. Given all this comes at no cost, it’s certainly worth taking a closer look.
All you need to do to have the chance to win the free FOWA Expo Stand & Delegate Package (sorry, eleigible only if you are a UK startup) is to join the Sun Startup Essential Programme (and use the tracking code FOWA08) and do it soon – the draw for this great prize will take place on the 22nd of September, with the winner announced the very next day – and of course, we’ll keep you informed here at The Next Web as to who the lucky winner is.
Giving away a free stand and delegate places for an important event like FOMA08 is a great way to support cash-strapped startups who are hungry for exposure in the UK – well done, Sun.
Thanks to a ‘stumble‘ by Melody McCloskey, I’ve found this brilliant footage of the trip Diggnation made to Amsterdam for The Next Web Conference. Especially fun are the parts about the Speakers Dinner at Boris’ house and some random footage from the live show. We’re really glad that Glenn, Kevin, Alex, Jim, and the others had a good time.
Some things in life seem so unimportant, yet when they change you’ll immediately notice it. An example: have you ever changed the position of your office litter bin? If you have ever did so, you probably remember you threw your garbage on the ground – on the exact place where your litter bin used to stand. Well, same goes for the Google favicon. It’s always there, you’re likely to just ignore it, but now that it has changed, it’s such an incredibly salient little thing.
The big G has changed into a small g. And though I hate to report about minor stuff like this – in Dutch we call it belly-button staring -, I had to share this interesting thought from a Google Blogoscoped forum member with you. Tony Ruscoe is philosophizing about the meaning behind this new favicon:
“Is Google undergoing a rebranding exercise…? Maybe they’re going to be known as ’the little g’ rather than ’The Big G’ from now on…
Google continues to grow and grow, but one of their self-proclaimed core values is “Think and act like an underdog”.
I had never heard of this core value, yet I’m sure to keep it in mind. It puts the whole Google strategy in another perspective. Maybe they have even lost the European Gmail case deliberately to appear like the poor underdog (insert wink smiley here).
One thing if for sure though, the more traction your service has, the more people talk about those minor changes. During The Next Web Conference, Digg founder Kevin Rose expressed the wish to have a small number of users again. So he could make radical changes to his social bookmarking service more easily. I see what he means, as only changing your favicon can be good for 276 blogposts with hundreds of comments.
Written on 15th May 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Written on 11th December 2008
Written on 9th October 2008
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Written on 7th September 2008
So far, I haven’t reported about the whole Nano buzz. 
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 
