Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on January 8, 2009 – 1:27 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Atherton Bartelby, a Brooklyn-based graphic designer, art director, writer, blogger, and photographer, wrote an interesting blog post on Mashable. He compares his Twitter experience with a party where everybody has a great time - which is in the end spoiled by a person that “doesn’t fit”. So he publishes an article on one of the world’s largest blogs to tell you when he won’t follow you. Ok, this kind of behavior is accepted in 2.0 land and if you ignore his initial concept, “FOLLOW FAIL: The Top 10 Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter” is actually a very valuable post.
Atherton Bartelby
Here are the ten reasons why Mr. Bartleby from Brooklyn, New York won’t follow you on Twitter:
- You have no user avatar
- You list no location, no website, or no bio
- Your “website” listed is a MySpace profile
- You’re following over 1,000 users, have 20 followers, and no updates
- Your profile features any variation of “Internet expert”
-
Your updates clearly indicate that your Twitter activity is always, only, about pushing your own service/product
-
Your following and my return follow result in a poorly-constructed auto-DM reading, “Thx for the follow! How can I help you get to a 4-Hour Work Week?”
- Your most recent updates make references to any need to achieve “more Twitter followers”
-
Your Twitter stream indicates a propensity for consistent arguing
- You do not engage your Twitter followers
Refer to the Mashable post to see Bartleby’s motivations. You can ignore a couple, like “Your profile features any variation of “Internet expert” - since that one comes from a man who calls himself a “social media connoisseur” (it’s always the social media experts who are truing to critize other social media experts of being one). The first two are pretty obvious and the third really matter of taste. But the ones about pushing, auto-DM’s, “more Twittter followers”, arguing, and engaging are pure gold.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on December 24, 2008 – 1:04 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some people I value highly weren’t in the list of people I follow on Twitter yet. But this morning, I found them all. I started following 52 people. I gotta thank the Twitter team for this, as they’ve relaunched the “Find people you know” feature. And, like Adam Ostrow from Mashable says, “it’s blazing fast“.
Within thirty seconds, Twitter imported my whole Gmail address book. There are a few things I noticed:
- First of all, a lot more people than I expected are active on Twitter. This probably goes for you too, so you can imagine the viral boost Twitter will get.
- Secondly, some fake twitter accounts were revealed. I noticed that one guy even posted Twitter updates for a Dutch political party
- I miss one thing in the address book finder: the date of the last update. I don’t want to follow someone who hasn’t updated for four months. That’s just clutter. And I don’t want to check every user manually. Help me out Twitter!
You can either search for someone’s name, or import your address book from GMail, AOL, Hotmail, and some other major email networks.
Written on October 27, 2008 – 10:38 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last Friday, Amsterdam was the scene of Holland’s first international blog conference BLOG08. Pete Cashmore (Mashable), Loren Feldman (1938media.com), Hugh MacLeod (Gapingvoid), and Scott Rafer (Lookery) all crossed the ocean to tell the European crowd how they could turn their blog in a successful one. Two of them, namely Cashmore and Rafer, focused on monetizing blogs.
Nobody wants money?
When the Mashable founder asked the crowd about monetizing, something noteworthy occurred. Anne Helmond reports:
When asked, hardly anyone in the room actually wants to monetize its blog. Pete is kind of surprised, especially if he asks the same question in the US where everyone raises their hands.
Language barriers
At first, I wasn’t really surprised. After all, most BLOG08 attendees report for a rather small group compared to bloggers who write in English. A Dutch blogger for example, only has an audience of 17 million people. Americans have a crowd of at least 300 million readers at their disposal.
What did struck me as odd was the reluctant attitude of most visitors towards money. Like it’s some kind of crime.
More revenue means more time for blogging
I’ve been blogging for a year before I made some money out of it. And ever since I started doing that, my blogging skills improved. More revenue means more time for blogging. I was able to quit my sorry day job and spend more time on reporting about tech.
A precondition on making some money with blogging is writing in English. Simply because you can reach a larger crowd. That’s not something I came up with. No, one of Holland’s most remarkable journalists, Nico Haasbroek, once told me that.
Write your articles in English, German, or French, so you can sell them to any magazine or newspaper.
Content producers should not be involved with advertising
Sure, my English isn’t perfect yet. But thanks to the euros earned, I can soon start following some English lessons. While I’m doing that, I keep another rather important lesson in mind. As read in Michael A. Banks’ Blogging Heroes, stated by Ken Fisher from Ars Technica:
Content producers should not be involved with advertising, to avoid even the appearance of advertised-influenced content.
So, work your ass off, create great content, and find an advertising partner like Federated Media as soon as you can make money out of your blog.
[Photo credit: Floris Dekker]
Written on October 16, 2008 – 3:25 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Two weeks ago, Dutch blogger Ridzert Beetstra wrote a post about a life insurance company that challenged all Dutchmen to “pimp” their funeral. After expressing his amazement, he ended the post by mentioning the song he wanted to hear on his funeral. What followed, were ten comments from people saying which song would be the soundtrack of their lives. I was one of them.
When I posted my request to family and friends, it didn’t seem then weird. But when I later thought about it, telling the world how the tunes during my farewell day will sound struck me as kind of odd. Particularly in the sense that I couldn’t imagine myself sharing something like that a few years ago.
Act normal, then you act crazy enough
The baby boomers and Generation X were raised to be modest people. Like the Dutch saying goes: “act normal, then you act crazy enough”. Sure, most western societies were pretty focused on the individual compared to most Asian cultures, yet self-expression was something that wasn’t considered to be decent. Adolescents formed groups and wore certain clothes or hairstyles to distinguish themselves, but that’s about it.
Every kid a brand
But my generation grew up with Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. Every single soul on the face of the planet could start its own brand by creating a page on one of these services. Choose your pictures, make sure you fill in the right favorite movies and books, collect as many friends as possible: every kid starts his or hers own brand.
Funeral great outlet for personal branding
When I see ten young men telling the world about their funeral song, I can’t help but thinking that we’ve become so focused on personal branding that even our burial or cremation forms a great outlet for it. I also recognize this in the marketing message of Richard Derks, co-founder of Respectance.com (a social network for the deceased):
Who dies in two years and doesn’t have a Tribute on Respectance.com, didn’t have a lot of friends
On L1veon1ine, users can, amongst other things, tag themselves to create a “digital” DNA, which floats in cyberspace forever. Gary Vanyerchuk told the Web 2.0 Expo New York audience that his biggest motivation was his online legacy, so that even his great grand children could see what he has done. Mashable’s Stan Schroeder gives four ways to deal with the Google Afterlife. You can also take the online material offline and publish it on your digital tombstone.
Taboo
Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe personal branding gave us an outlet to tell people something that used to be taboo: “yeah, I can finally share which song defines me”. However, I think it’s an interesting discussion. Did the focus on personal branding took away some of our social barriers?
The soundtrack of your life
To end this article, I’ve made a soundtrack of the funeral wishlist as posted on the Dutch blog. It might inspire you when writing your funeral scenario. Don’t forget to share your choice on Facebook.
Written on May 25, 2008 – 1:37 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Since everyone seems to be drowning in a flood of information, new start-ups emerge to throw us a lifebuoy. These entrepreneurs develop new ways for us to process information. The latest trend: converting text into speech.
The idea behind these kind of converters is that people can just walk away from the computer, but are still able to follow what’s happening on your favorite blog. So you can listen to the latest Next Web Blog posts while baking eggs or doing the dishes. A good time-saver, so several people have seized this opportunity to develop the next big thing. Here’s a short summary of the existing services. Please let me know if you have one to add.
When Boris and me crashed the parties of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month, we bumped into the guys of Swiss start-up Dixero. Luca Mascaro and Dafne Gobbi have developed a service that transforms posts into audio by using different computer-generated voices. Shortly after I had published this post, Frederic Martin notified me that Dixero wasn’t the only text-to-speech service out there. He used French service Xfruits, which has a rich set of converting features including RSS to speech. Though it’s not just a European matter, as there’s also a San Francisco-based start-up transforming text into speech called Stitcher.
But a service from Israel takes the whole transforming thing to another level. Bnarrator uses actual human beings for the translating. It’s just a matter of installing a widget, which keeps Bnarrator up to date about new content. Then one of their narrators starts to read the post up loud. So instead of a metallic-sounding speech-robot, you’ll hear a friendly and natural voice telling you what your favorite blogger has written about. To turn it into a profitable business, Bnarrator first plays an advertisement. Yet they don’t keep it all the revenue, as 30 percent goes to the site owner and another 5 percent goes to charities for blind people. They don’t stop to amaze me.
Mashable has already installed the service and they now have 623 narrated posts. Like the service too? Anyone can sign up here. To sum it up: their service is as charming as the narrator in this video:
Written on February 16, 2008 – 1:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After spending two days in the city of love and buying Valentine’s presents, the wildest ideas about love pop into your mind. At least in my experience they do… so here’s one! On my way to Paris I read an article in my favorite newspaper that said it started a dating service. Nothing special, since every newspaper in the Netherlands has its own dating service. They were just a little later.
Starting a dating service as a newspaper makes sense if you think about it. You choose a newspaper because you feel most comfortable with its political signature, tone of voice, cultural supplement and of course its brand experience. The newspaper I read for example is aimed at a young cosmopolitan audience, discusses broad themes instead of just the hottest news and highlights interesting and semi-intellectual stuff to do. If I were looking for a girlfriend, I would definitely want a girl who has the same ideas about what’s important in life and the world. So the perfect girl for me would probably read the same newspaper.
That’s where the dating service comes in. I could just browse through profiles of girls, without worrying whether she open for semi-intellectual stuff of not. Makes perfect sense to me. I mean, somebody who reads The New York Times would never date anyone who started the day with The New York Post. It goes for magazines too, a FHM man doesn’t want a high-brow New Yorker reader to spend his life with. Right?
If you think of it that way, blogs could easily start dating services as well. They discuss a specific hobby, passion, business or sports team etcetera and differentiate from each other by using a different tone of voice and design. If you’re an eligible bachelor in London, it mustn’t be that hard to meet an attractive tech-minded girl (correct me if I’m wrong guys), yet when you live in Liverpool you might need some help finding one. Wouldn’t it be great if a TechCrunch UK dating service came to the rescue?
Moreover, blogs have a big advantage compared to newspapers since they allow interaction between readers. You can judge on beforehand whether you like his or hers opinion on certain matters. Want some diversity? Check out an article that discusses an important topic and see if he or she has as totally different view on things.
One doubt about dating on blogs, I’m not sure about the man/woman ratio though as male readers are probably still a majority. Anyway, let me try to give you an idea what I’m talking about, here are some stereotype readers. Feel free to drop your experiences in the comments.
- TechCrunch Chick: she’s pretty straight-forward, would love to live in the Valley and is always looking for opportunities to come up with THE perfect business idea. And as no other, she knows money makes the world go round.
- VentureBeat Gentleman: killer-guy, working his ass off and likes to cut through the chase. One you thing must know ladies, he checks the business news every 15 minutes.
- Valleywag Queen: he/ she gossips the day round and has an radar for rumors. Great to drunk with, since he/she is a great story teller and knows how to crash a party. Don’t let your guard down though.
- Mashable Man: Girls, you sure gonna love his elegant and charismatic appearance. Yet after a while, you might feel a bit neglected since he’s always busy with meeting friends and keeping social contacts intact.
- ReadWriteWebWoman: Highly intelligent lady who likes to get to the bottom of things. Although her punctual and structured approach to life might start to get on you nerves.
- Loogic Guapa: For all of you who are looking for that Spanish temper, the Loogic guapa is your chick. If only all her friends wouldn’t speak Spanish all the time.
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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 of, the future of the Web. (
