Written on 6th February 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Founders from Left to Right: Chris Price (remains), Katie Lee, Ashley Norris
Shiny Media, the UK’s answer to Gawker Media, has taken a severe knock today with the loss of a number of staff and their second co-founder Katie Lee.
Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK received an email notifying him of the news which I have republished below.
August of last year so the loss of the first co-founder Ashley Norris who wrote a highly controversial discussion piece on TCUK, essentially highlighting the reasons why (he felt) blog publishing/networks ‘failed’ in the UK – well worth a read.
Moving Shiny forward
You don’t need me to tell you that that we are in the midst of some very tough times and sadly they affect new media networks like Shiny too.
We have held on as long as we could without restructuring the business but we now have to make those changes to secure the long-term stability of Shiny.
It is with huge regret that we are having to part company with several members of our team. They are very talented and extremely likable individuals, however ultimately in the current climate we are faced with no choice but to let them go.
We also announce today the departure of our editorial director and co-founder Katie Lee from Shiny. Katie played a massive role in developing Shiny and in particular several of its hero blogs. She has now decided that the time is right to leave the business. She does however remain a significant shareholder in Shiny and we are very grateful for all she has done over the years.
Shiny is a British new media success story. We have built a stable of great media brands that between them attract over three million readers each month. Times maybe tough now, but we are confident that this move, though painful in the short term, will leave us well placed to thrive and prosper in the future.
A year ago, exciting news about publishing 2.0 reached the blogosphere. Thriller writer Paulo Coelho had started to tell people how he was using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.
Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more (Watch the video here).
That was back in January, let’s see what Coelho has to say about tolerated piracy and publishing almost a year later.
What about publishers?
Coelho gives the same Russian example. Apparently, interviewer Kathy Brooks hadn’t heard of this sales boost before and she reacted very surprised. “What about your publisher?”, she asked in amazement. “They come to me and shout: this is not legal”, Coelho said. He then replies he’s just linking and that it’s not his fault. His American publisher wasn’t too pleased though. After a rather imitating call from CEO Jane Friedman, Coelho chose a middle way and made the book viewable – but not downloadable. The torrent links are still up there though. Why? Coelho: “You’ll have to share in order to get some revenue”.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t hurt your sales. People download the book but don’t read it They wait for the hard copy anyway”, Coelho continued. “Don’t be fooled by the publishers who say that piracy costs authors money.”
How the information overload influences writing
Co-host Loic Le Meur asked how the well-known information overload influences Coelho’s writing. The writer replied that he always had a dream of going to a lodge in the mountains and write the book of his life. So Coelho went to the Pyrenees and wrote his book. The result? The most boring piece of writing he had ever produced.
Coelho: “From now on I live a normal life when I write a book, since I’ve to stay connected to reality”. The Brazilian author builds up creative tension throughout a busy day. After having breakfast, reading newspapers, checking email, lunch and meeting with friends – Coelho finally frees 30 minutes to write: “Then I always wind up writing for five hours. My texts need to be touched by life.”
Many of you have been surprised by the sheer number of articles that we have been publishing on TheNextWeb recently so I’m going to let you into a little secret on how we managing it. It’s all due to a new piece of software that we oversaw a Techcrunch writer using (we wont say which one – see if you can guess) at the TC50 conference called Datapresser.
Industrial espionage is common in all businesses and we feel it is important in the blogsphere to do anything we can to “keep up with the Joneses”. Thus upon seeing TC using it and curious as to its functionality we forthwith conducted a due diligence investigation.
Once we set up this software, we were astonished to see that its function is to create articles for blogs automatically. Yes believe it or not, this tool uses the latest technology to create unique articles for Wordpress. All you have to do is select a topic of interest, add in a few links you would like to be included in the article and press go.
So how does it work? It uses something called Mad-Lib (pattern replacement) technology which works like this:
{|Custom|Suzy, Sally, John, Jacob}
{|Custom|is, was, will be, wants to be}
{|Custom|a Doctor, a Nurse, an Actor, an Acrobat}
Here are the results of that Mad-lib script
John wants to be a Nurse.
Or
Sally was a Doctor.
Or
Suzy wants to be an Acrobat.
Or
Jacob wants to be an Actor…etc.
Now what Datapresser does is take this process to a whole new level, not only do they have a massive database that you plug straight into which allows you to mix and match content until your hearts content but also they have a number of other tools which when used in conjunction with Datapresser, further enhance the uniqueness of the articles.
“Wellscripted content made by Datapresser can pass human inspection by Google or anyone else!”
It’s a numbers game
Many might ask what is the point of creating so many articles, well if you was a diligent TC reader you would have noticed the recent article on TC, entitled The More You Post, The Higher You Rank. See it’s a numbers game.
“The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog).”
Remix the top ten
So while we’re happy that our visitor numbers are rising rapidly we also realize the only hope we have in this race is to use the same software as the major players in order to keep the quantity equal to theirs. So for the last two weeks all the articles we’ve published have been made using it and we’ve had really good results, plus no one has even noticed!
Even this article your reading was made using Datapresser (with only a few tweaks as it tends to go on and on about itself).
What we have done is set it up to automatically read the rest of the main blogs in the morning, then Datapresser rehashes the theme of the top 10 articles and recompiles these into unique blog posts on the same topic. It’s bloody marvelous. It means that we can set it to publish 10 or even 20 articles a day while we sit back and got on with other work.
It’s what all the top blogs are doing these days but they’d never admit it, as once the cat is out of the bag everyone will be at it…
Way to go CNN. On the very day that social media rockstar Barack Obama announces who his running mate will be, the news channel introduces embeddable video. The political season at the other side of the ocean is really heating up now and CNN is there to supply us with some video coverage. I think it’s pretty safe to say that they have the ambition to turn their video content into a viral phenomenon.
Army of promoters
By introducing the embed button, CNN has basically hired an army of promoters. Every time a blogger decides to accompany a post with a CNN video, he basically puts the word out for the American news company. So I don’t see any reasons, apart from the traditional backward ones – to NOT offer embeddable videos.
So here’s how the 406px by 393px video player looks:
CNN wants you to download Firefox 3
CNN punished me for still using the 2.0 Firefox edition (Yeah I know, sorry), as I wasn’t able to get the embed code in that browser. Luckily I also have Safari 3 running, which is a CNN Video-compatible browser. Linux users won’t be able to share in the CNN joy, as the flash player sadly doesn’t support that OS.
Apart from that glitch, I’d like to congratulate CNN with yet another step into the future of web publishing.
Women are beautiful. Street photographer Garry Winograndstated this in 1975 and he’s absolutely right. Online marketeers also agree with him and they don’t leave any chance unused to make some money out of their online presence.
Daily Candy – formerly owned by Pilot Group Ventures – sends its subscribers a daily email with tips, news, and info about fashion, food, travel and other glossy magazine-like topics.
Comcast was battling with Viacom to acquire DailyCandy, which allegedly makes 25 million dollars a year. Comcast has beaten the other advertising giant with 5 million dollars. Women are beautiful, especially in the world of online publishing.
Since its incredible rise (and with no fall in sight), Wikipedia has been giving the old-school encyclopedias – the ones that are made from paper – a hard time. Some even say that the online user-edited reference book will eventually rule out the paper version like Brittanica. German publishing giant Bertelsmann now wants to prove those critics wrong by publishing the world’s first reference book based on the work of web volunteers: the Wikipedians.
“The Wikipedia encyclopedia will help allow knowledge to be spread worldwide and become more accessible,” the publishing director at Bertelsmann Lexicon, Beate Varnhorn, said in a statement.
“The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia” will include 50,000 of the most popular search terms of the last two years and will be in stores from September.
According to Varnhorn, “The abridged, one-volume print edition will reach new target groups which will get to know the Wikipedia project and take part in it.” I’m sure this is right, though I doubt whether those groups will have the mind-set that is needed for an user-edited encyclopedia. I mean, it’s one thing Wikipedia is an online medium, but the fact that ordinary people have enough authority for editing a reference book might be a little hard to take for some people.
Anyhow, it’s a charming initiative that explores and broadens the boundaries of publishing. Especially as one euro from every 19,95 euro copy goes to the German chapter of Wikimedia, the non-profit group behind Wikipedia.
Issuu offers people the possibility to publish their own illustrated magazine. It’s just a matter of spending some time on a pdf file – so start working on your Indesign skills – and uploading it to their beta site. Issuu then publishes your magazine with a slick tool and makes it findable by archiving it in categories like fashion, architecture, arts and.. sex. Yeah sorry, I couldn’t help noticing that the founders aren’t afraid of really explicit sex magazines.
Users can then tell their friends about the magazine they’ve created and embed it on their blog or social network profile. Not that they necessarily need to, since the founders of Issuu also want their service to be a ‘creative community’.
Sounds all pretty publishing 2.0-like, but is it really?
Yes, it is, because: Everybody can upload pdf-files and gets a really fancy tool to show it. I must admit, the interface looks awesome.
No, it isn’t, because: Web 2.0 is also about finding stuff, just ask David Weinberger. And an online pdf file sounds a bit 1.0 to me. You can’t link to a particular article and people can’t tag a page on del.icio.us or Fleck, or comment wherever they want. And don’t even think of embedding a YouTube video. It reminds me of the newspapers in the early years of the Internet who just published their articles on-line and that was it.
Yet Issuu is a good stepping stone for everybody who wants to get used to on-line publishing. Think of the people who hardly know what a blog is. They might like the idea, since it reminds them of a ‘real’ magazine. After this getting-used-to-process, they can switch to Wordpress with a magazine-style theme. So they can experience the REAL benefits of publishing 2.0 style.
So imagine that this large group of people who wants to get used to the web starts using Issuu. Then the service might get really popular. However, I don’t think that it will ever become a successful community. Because, in the end, the sex magazines will flourish and frighten other visitors – that, for example, publish magazines about wine from Tuscany.
Not that the founders probably mind, since sex has never been bad for advertising revenues. Yet if they really want a lively community, a ’safe mode’ is a must. A 50-year old lady who uploaded a magazine about interior design, doesn’t want her tennis friends to stumble upon a porn magazine.
“Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile?”. With that question, Anne Zelenka started a post on GigaOM that created a fairly big buzz in the blogosphere (143 comments and trackback plus 541 diggs). She wrote about DiSO, a project that by using OpenID as an identifier and Wordpress as publishing platform wants to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” With some sophisticated blogroll-related plugins, bloggers would be able to build a social networking place that’s customizable to the max, since it’s their own place. It’s an idea by Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency.
It sounds like a great idea, especially now everybody seems to look for ways to connect their abundance of social services. Remember what Marc Canter said in Paris on Le Web 3: ‘We ALL want social systems that DO connect with other social systems.
However, Zelenka added a critical remark in her post, stating that not everybody wants one place to present their digital identity. Some people prefer several places to present themselves in different ways for different audiences.
I believe that DiSO might get popular, but I doubt whether it will get picked up on a massive scale. It seems like a nice tool for the geeky crowd out there. The ones that actually care about their on-line identity and think outside the borders of their group of friends and acquaintances. Who already have a well-styled and written personal blog. For them it’s a nice extra.
For the large audience however, it’s just a little too complicated. Yet for them, there are also interesting blog tools emerging. Tools that make blogging more accessible and look better than the old-fashioned Blogger.com design. Have a look at Blogonize for example. It’s basically an AJAXified blogging platform that makes it easier for users to create ‘one heck of a blog’ and thus might stimulate a huge crowd to finally start blogging.
Tumblr also fits perfectly into the trend. Ok, it’s not 100% blogging, but it sure looks like it. They say that when blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks. It’s another easy way for users to easily share what they create and find on the web, in a gorgeous way.
So yes, blogging will get more popular for the normal users, since it’s a way for them to present themselves in a more personal way. But the process of installing a blog on a server and activating plugins is just a little too much to ask from them. Or will the guys from DiSo find a more accessible way to create the so-wanted personal social networkingtool?
Tip: Read this inspiring article by Hugh MacLeod in which he explains why he prefers blogging over social networks.
Written on 6th February 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Written on 9th December 2008
Written on 27th September 2008
Women are beautiful. Street photographer 
“Could open-source blogging platform 
For the large audience however, it’s just a little too complicated. Yet for them, there are also interesting blog tools emerging. Tools that make blogging more accessible and look better than the old-fashioned Blogger.com design. Have a look at 
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 
