Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 26th June 2009
2 COMMENTS 
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
With news of Michael Jackson’s passing sinking in, the web has now recovered from the initial traffic surges it suffered as word first spread. As the blogosphere picks apart the way the story unfolded online, many are coming to the conclusion that the realtime web isn’t really the best place to get news accurately.
The first two sources to confirm Jackson’s death were online. TMZ and the LA Times suffered vast traffic surges that took them down, while Twitter (in between outages) was spreading misinformation about other celebrity deaths. Hours after the rumour began, people are still asking if Jeff Goldblum is dead (he isn’t).
So, when you can’t rely on the internet, TV’s the place to go right? Sure TV news is always there and it’s more careful with its facts; is it really any more useful though? Pictures for Sad Children makes a great point in this cartoon. The internet maybe unreliable, but at least it says something!
Written on 25th June 2009
3 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
A law has been passed in Kazakhstan tightening control over the internet in a way which could restrict free speech.
Under the new law, chat rooms, blogs and public forums count as mass media, and therefore bloggers and individuals alike could break the law for expressing their opinions.
Gatherings and protests have taken place against the new law, many of which have been clamped down upon by the Kazakh government (more…)
Written on 18th June 2009
3 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Google is reportedly set to launch a new way to browse its News service. Flipper will let you view the results of your searches in a magazine format. This more visual way to browse the news should make it quicker to get a feel for which stories you want to read. It should be a natural format for quick scanning on a touchscreen device like the iPhone.
It’s not only Google News that needs an overhaul though. Another important search tool from Mountain View is in desperate need of some TLC. Over the past few months Google Blog Search has gone from being a useful resource for scanning the state of the blogoshere to difficult-to-navigate bucket of spam blogs and automatically generated Delicious link lists.
If you’re searching for what blogs are saying about a particular subject you need to cut out all the spam and automated nonsense and just get down to what matters – original content, indexed quickly. It’s unclear why it’s happened but Google Blog Search is now longer fit for purpose.
Nearly 24 hours ago here at The Next Web we published a story called “Stop Hating on IE6! You’ll hurt its feelings!” You’d think Google would have indexed it by now? Apparently not. A search for the phrase “Stop hating on IE6″ returns four results – all of them contain references to our post but none of them are the actual post. In fact, the references to the orginal post are from people’s Twitter streams, embedded in their blogs.
So, if you want to find a post in Google Blog Search you’ll have to go via someone’s tweet, via their own blog. Rival blog searcher Twingly finds the original post straight away.
While Flipper looks like a nice new way to use Google’s existing search technology, ta search technology that appears to be crumbling away.
Google is reportedly set to launch a new way to browse its News service. Flipper will let you view the results of your searches in a magazine format. This more visual way to browse the news should make it quicker to get a feel for which stories you want to read. It should be a natural format for quick scanning on a touchscreen device like the iPhone, too.
It’s not only Google News that needs an overhaul though. Another important search tool from Mountain View is in desperate need of some TLC. Over the past few months Google Blog Search has gone from being a useful resource for scanning the state of the blogoshere to difficult-to-navigate bucket of spam blogs and automatically generated Delicious link lists.
(more…)
Written on 10th June 2009
16 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
The founders of Last.fm have resigned. In a blog post today Felix Miller, Richard Jones and Martin Stiksel announced that “After two years running Last.fm within CBS we feel the time is right to begin the process of handing over the reins.”
Last.fm has had a rocky road to where it is today. Starting out as a music community site in 2002, it incorporated Richard Jones’ Audioscrobbler project for recording and charting users’ listening habits in 2005. The early days of the service were marred by regular database crashes and users lost listening data on several occasions. (more…)
Written on 10th June 2009
1 COMMENT
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
It’s been possible for over a year but until now it’s been the preserve of a few geeks, bloggers and journalists. Could 2009 be the year live video streaming from mobile phones goes mainstream?
It’s been announced that one of the most popular live streaming apps, Qik, is to be pre-loaded with all of Nokia’s S60 smartphones, starting with their new flagship N97.
Qik’s CEO Ramu Sunkara is understandably upbeat about the news. “To be pre-loaded on all their Symbian S60 devices speaks to the confidence that Nokia has in Qik for its consumers around the world. We are extremely pleased that this pre-load is starting with Nokia N97, a truly game changing device.” (more…)
Written on 10th June 2009
3 COMMENTS
Ralf Rottmann, Serial Mobile Entrepreneur, Apple Addict
We recently asked all Twitter third party app developers to get rid of asking for user credentials and kindly switch to delegated authentication based on the open OAuth protocol. Today we want to point you to some possible breaking API changes Twitter is going to implement within the next weeks:
As part of our changes for OAuth version 1.0a I have been looking at how this is going to work and there is going to need to be a change that will not be backward compatible. Some of this is already coded and waiting to go, and some of it is in-progress. I expect we will deploy this the end of next week or the beginning of the following one in order to allow you to have a minimum of 7 days to make changes. (more…)
Written on 27th May 2009
2 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
As many of you may or may not know, tonight is the European Champions League, an event of enormous standing if you’re a football (soccer) fan.
The event is such a spectacle, Google have altered their logo to feature a green version featuring a football stadium.
However, on a more serious note, a survey conducted by Firewall security firm Tufin Technologies revealed 39% of IT Professionals would not take their eyes of the match, no matter what the scale of IT failure. Simply put, they would not be disturbed during the final.
As you can (hopefully) tell, this is all a bit tongue in cheek, the real purpose of the survey was in regard to firewall management. According to PC Pro, the survey revealed that “63% of companies only check the rules governing their firewalls every three months, with 9% not bothering at all. A further 51% freely admitted their firewall rules are “a mess.”"
Additionally, “24% of IT professionals admitted they would happily buy hardware for their company from eBay if it saved them money, despite the inherent security and stability risks.”
Written on 7th May 2009
18 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
![150+ of the most popular blogs and news sites about the WorldWideWeb [The OPML files]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/3382977725_519a106d2a_b-300x200.jpg "3382977725_519a106d2a_b")
It’s no secret we completely disagree regarding the recent discussions over the death of RSS and as a commitment to it, we’re starting a new series titled
The OPML files.
The series will feature lists of the most respected and popular blogs & sites in various different categories, and to make things easier for you – we’ve done the hard work and include an OPML file for each list.
What is an OPML file?
See here for full details, but all you really need to know is that its the file that RSS readers use when exporting and importing RSS feeds.
Today, we feel its appropriate to start with Web/Tech Blogs.
How did we compile each list? Frankly, research. For each industry the mechanism and sources are going to be different. For tech blogs for example, we’ve looked at traffic, Technorati, Digg, Techmeme, recommendations and other lists.
Ok, so lets get started:
Download OPML file here and below are the list of the sites included and their RSS feeds:
Written on 29th April 2009
8 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
*Update*
A commenter has notified us of the same phishing scam on a different URL – FBStarter.com. Double check your URL’s whenever logging in to Facebook.
A phishing scam is reportedly spreading fast through Facebook, requesting users to login via a phony URL FBAction.net.
Once you attempt to login, a few moments later your password is changed and all your friends are emailed. A reader of AllFacebook.com apparently entered the details accidentally and has not been able to access his account since.
Whilst it’s not likely to trick geeks into handing over their passwords, the average user is unlikely to spot the URL difference, and with 200 million users, you can see why Facebook is such a target.
![Alert: New Facebook Phishing Scam. Be aware. [Updated]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/picture-148-600x335.png "picture-148")
Written on 28th April 2009
5 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The European Research Council have granted a Dutch University €2.5 Million to continue developing a Unix-type operating system. The new operating system aims to be more reliable, stable and secure than Linux or Microsoft Windows.
According to a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, the recipients of the fund with include three researchers and two programmers, and will allow further research into a making the operating system capable of fixing itself when a bug is detected.
“Whilst on other operating system crashes usually hang up the machine, the new OS is designed so drivers operate like applications outside of the kernel, which means if they crash, the computer will carry on. The concept is called a “microkernel” rather than its opposite, a monolithic kernel.” Tanenbaum said.
The funding will allow research to continue for five more years.
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 
