Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 17th April 2009
1 COMMENT 
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Jim Stolze asks the audience “can you do without the internet” which is addressed with a loud “NO” by the bloggers sitting behind me. As part of his research project he asked people what they would do without the internet.
Seth Godin said he would have to open a restaurant. Boris (The Next Web) said he would be a professional shoe shiner and still be the happiest man in the world. Patrick (The Next Web) would still organize the Next Web in 2010, with our without the internet.
Jim completely went offline and unplugged for a whole month last December . It was the most fun thing he ever did, at least for the first week. He appreciated all the hand written letters people sent him. However after the first week of experiencing different kind of emotions some of the easiest things seemed very hard to do without being connected.
He reached a peace of mind because no internet meant no distractions. He was more productive and actually wrote the first half of his book in this period. The main question after December was, how to keep this ability to focus with all the online distractions?
The reason he had to go back into the “digital jungle” was because of his research project. The main research question is “Does the internet make you happy?” Previous research has shown that internet users are happier than people who don’t have internet (I wonder if the GDP has been taken into account.) Stolze wants to know in which situations the internet is a drive for our happiness.
Jim Stolze poses five ways in which the internet can make us happier:
- Don’t take your Blackberry into the bedroom
- Remember there is more information on the web that you can read
- Rely more on social filters such as Delicous and Twitter
- Know the difference between online and offline (when do you send a text message/when do you just drop by)
- Charge 1 cent for every email (it will rule out spam!)
Be online and be happy.
Written on 17th April 2009
0 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Ruigrok | NetPanel, research partner of The Next Web, conducts online research to measure webusage of consumers. Every year, results are compared to the year before to discover or uncover trends on the usage of the web. What kind of websites and applications do we use, in an active or more passive way? How active are we on online networks and mobile internet?
And, with all of our personal information we leave on the web, how do we think and act on behalf of our ‘online identity’? How do we spend and earn money online? And how do we feel about the usability of websites in general? And more..
The complete report of The Next Web 2009 will be available online (in Dutch) by the end of April. This report will contain target groups (women verses men, young versus old etcetera).
Written on 16th April 2009
4 COMMENTS
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Research for Europe and Latin America, leading the Yahoo! Research labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, and also supervising the lab in Haifa, Israel. Yahoo! Research is about developing new technology, not only for search but also for other internet purposes. Web search is no longer about document retrieval so we need means for web-mediated goals.
Intent and result
Search all depends on your intent. We’re trying to move away from a to-do or to-find intent to actual task completion. What are the challenges we are facing? You have to do it fast and it has to be scalable. Fast completion may be achieved through immediately presenting short cuts, deep links, enhanced results.
The premise is that people don’t want to search. Instead, people want to get their tasks done and get straight to their answers. So how to we do this? We move from a web of pages to a web of objects. People, places, businesses, restaurants are all objects that have attributes such as noisy or expensive (in the case of restaurants.) Intents of searchers are satisfied by presenting objects and attributes. It’s not exactly the semantic web but about finding implicit relations through web usage.
Opening up search
Baeza-Yates shows the SearchMonkey Ecosystem which he describes as a “win-win situation” where publishers can contribute objects and define how they want to present themselves and yield better results. By building an open ecosystem publishers would have incentives to contribute. The aim is to provide a more coherent search experience. The ecosystem wishes to leverage the wisdom of crowds which is not about the internet but about people. The premise of the wisdom of the crowds is that
under the right circumstanes, groups are remarkably intelligent.
The problem is the word ‘right’ – aggregating the ‘right’ data is the answer.
In the history of search 1996 was about descriptive data such as descriptions from librarians. In 1998 it was all about links, ranking and PageRank, using the wisdom of the publishers, the webmasters. However now in 2009 anyone can put links on the web so it’s not working anymore. According to Baeza-Yates it’s all about tags and in t future – we can use everything, queries from all web users.
Tag Explorer shows how tags may be used within search. In the example Baeza-Yates shows what people do with Flickr. It’s an endless form of image browsing where you can edit/add/remove tags and change your query. Tags are better than image features but together they are much better as they are complementary. One uses semantics and the other syntactic features but if you search for images, tags are better than just image processing.
Exploiting microformats
So how can we use the existing great amount of content? We need to exploit the metadata that is already on the web and make it even richer by bridging implicit and explicit metadata. The Correlator can already bridge such relations within Wikipedia and provides a new search experience by bridging implicit and explicit metadata.
Written on 7th April 2009
7 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Every year, before the conference we do some marketing research together with Ruigrok/NetPanel.
This year we are looking into social networking, online identities and how people (yes, people!) generate revenue online. We will present the results during the conference so the more people answer all questions the better.
We ask a lot of questions so prepare to spend close to 10 minutes on it. We do hope that you will invest that time as the results will be available, and important, to everybody working online.
Consider it a gift to our audience from us and you:
[Start Questionnaire]
Written on 3rd March 2009
18 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
The title of this post is a quote from Wittgenstein which kept popping into my head as I was traveling through Europe these past weeks. I visited France on a ski trip, stopped over in Vienna by airplane and then traveled to Budapest by car.
I speak Dutch, some English, a little German and unfortunately only know one word in Hungarian. The conference I’m visiting only had 4 English presentations: my own, Ernst-Jan’s and two more. Unfortunately none of the other presentations used the only Hungarian word I know.
Hungary has a population of about 10 million people. After WW1 the country got split up and Hungary lost 72% of its land (a sensitive subject even now) which means that there are about 14.5 million people who still speak the language.
In Europe we tend to compare ourselves to the US regularly. We are jealous of the great start-up cultures in cities like San Francisco and the entrepreneurial spirit that so many Americans seem to have. But how much difference is there really between these two parts of the world? Lets take a good look at some statistics.
Population
The US has a population of more than 300 million. Compare that to Hungary and you aren’t too well off. Compare it to Europe as a whole and the figures look different. There are more than 700 million Europeans. That is twice as big an audience as the US?! Suddenly I don’t feel so alone anymore.
Language
Those 700 million people are divided by language, right? They all speak different languages so it is too difficult to reach them? Well yeah, there are 23 official langauges in the European Union and 65 languages and/or dialects in total. That sure sounds fragmented.
Everybody in the United States at least speaks English, right? Well, almost. English is not the official language of the United States but more than 82% of the population speaks it as their native language.
Lets look at Europe again: 51% of all europeans speak English as a second or first language. That actually means that there are more people who speak English in Europe (357 million) than there are people in the United States, in total!
Money
It isn’t really about the language is it? It must be about the money. The United States is a richer market. But is that really true?
It looks like the GDP of the US was about USD 14,330,000 in 2008 and USD 18,930,000 in Europe (In millions of dollars).Yep, Europe is doing a lot better than the US when it comes to GDP. Maybe GPD growth? Is the US growing faster than we are? I don’t know what the results will be of the current economic crisis but when you look at from 2006 till 2007 the United States GDP grew 4.9% and our GDP grew 16%.
Maybe you say I’m making these numbers up as a biased European? Nope, they are from the CIA World Fact Book. Surely the CIA can be trusted on their own numbers?
The more I think about it the more interesting Europe becomes to me:
- There are more people in Europe
- More people speak English in Europe than there are people in the US
- We have more money in Europe than in the US
- We are growing faster
I have to admit, all these ‘facts’ are based on statistics. And we all know how trustworthy those are. But I do suggest you do your own research and look at what you can find out about the differences between Europe and the United States before you pack your bags and move to San Francisco.
Now all that is left for me to do is convince all the Internet Entrepreneurs in Hungary, and Europe, to actually start speaking English…
Written on 3rd March 2009
5 COMMENTS
Jim Stolze,
Is there a relationship between Internet Usage and Happiness? That was the research question of my project called the Virtual Happiness Project. As you might remember I spent the whole month of December being offline, just to experience what that did to me and the people around me.
I was asked to talk about my experience during TED University this year. So, here are the slides of my presentation and the written out version of my talk:
Could you live without the Internet?
Ask yourself that question. Could you live without the Internet for a day, for a week, for a month or langer? And what would you do?
I asked Seth Godin, who is also a speaker here on TED and he answered: I’ve thought about that, I’d have to open a restaurant. What an amazing answer, to an intruiging question. Why am I interested in this question? it’s is because I myself went completetly offline for the whole month of December 2008. No google, no email no surfing. no nothing.
The most fun thing I ever did… at least that’s what I thought during the first week. It was funny, it was hilarious, people were sending me hand written letters and pulling al kinds of practical jokes on me (like hiding my keyboard and mouse).
But than in the second week all the attention dried up and there I was … alone behind my desk with a huge problem. The simplest things became hard to do and I regretted my experiment at this time.
(more…)
Written on 30th November 2008
14 COMMENTS
Jim Stolze,
Well that’s it. Tomorrow is my first day in offline land. I’ll be disconnected from the internet: no email, no google, no blogging, no twitter… no nothing.
Why? Because I want to know how that is. What am I going to miss the most? And what are the things that I’m happy to miss?
These crazy questions came up when I was working on a research project. A study that examines the effects of internet on our happiness. Does the internet make you happy?
The internet makes you sad
From what I have studied the last months I can tell that some forms of internet usage really make you sad. For example people who suffer from information stress, from not being able to filter or deal with the unlimited amount of content that is potentially under their finger tips.
Or think about email. Email is a monster that gets bigger every time you fight it. Just when you think you have it under control (you’ve replied to 40 messages), at least sixteen of them are allready awaiting you with a next action. No wonder initiatives like the E-mail free Friday grow bigger.
The internet makes you happy
Also there is much proof of situations in which the internet actually makes you happy. In my talk at the PicNic-festival in Amsterdam I’ve spoken about the virtual happiness-hypothesis.
By exchanging bits and bites with people in other rooms -but behind their screens- you simulate social interaction, increasing your happiness. Because that’s what we’re built to do: to socially interact (besides to reproduce of course).
The aim of the research project is to combine all studies and theories on internet / happiness, and come up with a conceptual model. It would be wonderful to write a manual for the happy digital citizen.
No farewell, just goodbye
Don’t get me wrong: I love the internet. And I’ve done almost anything the last four years when it comes to maintaining a digital lifestyle. That’s why “The Next Web” seemed the perfect place to say goodbye for now.
I’ve decided to go offline for (only?) a full month, so I’ll be back online in January 2009. If you want to reach me in the mean time, feel free to send me a post card or let’s meet IRL.
P.s. Please feel free to comment on this article, but forgive me if I don’t reply within a month :-)
Written on 30th June 2008
7 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Colour me unsurprised: the internet has almost double the influence of television in consumer decision-making in the UK, Germany and France, according to the Digital Influence Index (DII), a study of media consumption and online behaviors conducted by Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive.
In all three countries, the internet ranks as the most influential medium among internet users, with index scores of 44% in the UK, 45% in Germany, and 46% in France. That translates into roughly twice the influence of the second-strongest channel, television, and about eight times the influence of traditional printed media.
Consumers in all three countries are more likely to seek others’ opinions, through social media and product-rating sites, for making personal decisions. In contrast, they use company-controlled sources when making transactional decisions on commoditized items, such as utilities or airline tickets.
Other findings: while consumers see the clear benefits of the internet on their lives, they continue to have concerns about internet safety and the trustworthiness of some online information. In the UK, for example, 66% of online consumers say the internet helps them make better decisions, but just 28% trust the information companies provide on the internet.
The research also confirms some clichés: the French are the most engaged in digital communications, with two-thirds of web users owning a webcam and three-fourths using IM. UK consumers are the most likely to have created an online profile site on a social networking page, and Germans are more likely to have used the internet for research.
Fleishman-Hillard, working cooperation with Harris Interactive, interviewed nearly 5,000 internet users in the UK, Germany and France. The survey was designed to measure media-consumption patterns, internet behaviour and attitudes, and online social networking involvement, as well as to assess the internet’s influence on specific decisions.
Via MarketingCharts.
(The chart embedded above is a courtesy of Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive.)
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 
