Written on 18th November 2008
1 COMMENT 
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
During this economic climate Journalists, as with many other professions, have taken a hit. Six Apart, the blog publishing company, has come up with an interesting way to help those poor journalists get back on the grind – they’ve called it TypePad Journalist Bailout Programme .
How it Works
To Get Involved
Just send them them a link to your last piece for a newspaper, magazine or broadcast journalism venue to
bailout@sixapart.com.Sixapart have been quoted as saying
“While we’re obviously having a bit of fun with the “bailout” name, this program is something we’re serious about. The dollar value for you for the TypePad subscription alone works out to over $150 a year, but we know that for a lot of working journalists, one of the biggest obstacles towards independence can be just trying to figure out where to start. Now you’ve got an answer.
You’ve got to hand it to them, it’s definitely a novel idea and apparently there has been great interest so get on the bandwagon while you still can journos!
via Guardian
Written on 11th December 2007
2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Le Web 3 kicked off with pumping house beats and an excited couple LeMeur: “We’re all changing the world, so spread the word!”. After this enthusiastic start, Le Web switched to a more critical view on the web revolution. Dan Rose (Facebook), Michel Jaccard (attorney), Jarwoong Lee (Daum Communications, South Korea) and Chris Alden (SixApart) talked about the dark side of web 2.0.
Foto by LeWeb
The four gentlemen seemed to agree: the online world is nothing more than a reflection of the real world. Alden:,,It’s the anonymity that brings the ruder side of us out. The companies SixApart is working for, now more and more often ask us to give users a profile. As it turns out, people behave more polite then”.
Online bullying
The government of South Korea is taking this approach to an extreme level. In order to stop online bullying by kids, the government wants to give their children a personal key to access all the available services. Lee doesn’t agree with this drastic way of preventing bullying: “Privacy is more important. Particularly when you consider the risks of identity theft. Moreover, bullying happens on the schoolyard as well. The government therefore should focus on education instead.”
Then all the eyes focused on big shot Facebook. Rose: ,,Half of our 57 million users comes back every day. They are part of 50.000 plus individual networks. Almost nobody uses Facebook anonymously, since our service is based on real world relationships. People won’t become your friend if they don’t know you. So Facebook loses its value when you use a false identity. Therefore, people behave the same way as they do in real life.”
Privacy
Rose also admitted that Facebook made mistakes during the launch of Beacon: “We didn’t listen to our users when they said that didn’t feel like they had control. That contrasted with our normal approach, namely giving users the options to choose who can see their info. Moreover, we did a bad job explaining Beacon. We’ve launched it together with an advertising platform. Therefore users thought it was primarily an advertising tool. It wasn’t designed as such.”
Yet, Rose still believes in the concept of Beacon. “Users still want an easy way to share info with friends. We just have to give them control when we develop a new way.”
User generated content is crap
Lee: “The talks about soccer used to only take place in café’s, now they’re also published on the web. So yes, a lot of user generated content is crap.” Alden didn’t agree, stating that we too often regard Internet as an newspaper. “We think: if information is irrelevant, it’s crap. On the Internet this is not the case, it’s more like a living space. What’s crap for somebody, is relevant to others.” Rose noticed an evolution in ugc: “The first content produced by users were the customer reviews on Amazon. Those were valuable sometimes, however you never knew who had written it. Then bloggers emerged, and we were able to put the reviews in a context. Even though we don’t know them personally. We do know our Facebook friends personal, so their reviews are most relevant to us.”
That’s probably also the reason why on Facebook, there isn’t a lot of spamming going on. The critical discussion ends with a positive note by Rose: “It’s a movement to better content”.
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