Written on 22nd June 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
What you see here is the “Geek Hand Sign” T-shirt by British designer Roger Denyer. Roger designed the shirt so you could demand some respect from your fellow geeks. If you are a web developer or coder use this sign and you’ll get a nod of respect from your fellow computer geeks.
Or maybe you will once and for all prove the world how incredibly geeky you really are.
Either way, the shirts are for sale at RubyRed T-shirt Design for €21,46 (that isn’t a random price of course but a number that only real geeks understand the meaning of) in a variety of colors.
If you are a REAL geek you will have to ask your sister which color will look good with your zits and pimples.
Written on 6th May 2008
12 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
We have just installed a new WordPress plug-in that allows readers to tag their own comments. The tags are hosted on the Commentag.com server and do not interfere with your search ranking or existing comment infrastructure. It is simply an add on with some functionality to make it easier to sort through comments. Although the company has launched in early April they haven’t done any marketing until now.
The service was started by three friends; Xavier Damman (24), Arnaud Coomans (25) and Olaf Witkowski (24). Two of them live in London and one works from Belgium.
From the Commentag blog: “The idea came to my mind with a blog I created about 4×4. It fostered many comments and a journalist who wanted to know the most common arguments (either for or against SUV). Unable to provide a quick answer, we imagined a system which could deal with that particular issue.”
So they came up with a simple tool to Tag comments and a Tag cloud to quickly navigate comments. So now, when you think a post sucks you can leave a comment and tag your comment: ‘Sucks’. The next commenter will be presented with a suggestionbox for tags and one of them will be ‘Sucks’. He can then choose to include the ‘Sucks’ tag in his comment too. Or maybe he will use ‘Brilliant’.
Someone reading the post and wanting to find out how many negative comments there are can then click the ‘Sucks’ tag in the tagcloud and all comments that aren’t tagged ‘Sucks’ will be hidden. Then you can deselect the ‘Sucks’ tag and highlight all the posts tagged ‘Brilliant’.
For blogs that receive dozens of comments on each post this will be a great way to add some sense to their comments section. Being able to quickly look at all positive VS negative posts could be a great tool for reader and possibly stimulate them to comment even more.
We will be testing the Commentag plug-in here and look forward to getting a lot of tagged comments on this post.
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 
