Archive for April, 2008
Written on April 30, 2008 – 7:06 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Tim Berners-Lee
Two articles caught my attention today. The first is a post about a talk given by Lee Clow, global director of media arts at TBWA Worldwide at the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Leadership Conference yesterday. The article quotes Clow: “Online advertising is still semi-nowhere. It’s very intrusive and annoying and kind of the worst of our business in terms of pop-up and flash, and jump up and down.”
But the future looks bright: “The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter”. The article is worth reading as there are a few more interesting quotes.
That the web is still young is something Kevin Kelly made very clear during his keynote speech at the Next Web Conference 2006 in Amsterdam. He told the audience then that the Web was only 4000 days old and we could expect even more changes, innovation and improvements in the coming 4000 days.
The other article worth reading can be found on the BBC website. Read that one too. It is an interview with ‘the web’s inventor’ Sir Tim Berners-Lee about the 15th birthday of the world wide web today. He says that the web as we know it today is still in its infancy and expects the Next Web to put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user.
If that happens, you will read it here first.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on April 30, 2008 – 3:28 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
A blogger from Wales has just learned the difference between ‘Freedom of Speech’ and ‘grossly offensive and menacing messages’. After being arrested and charged with over 19 theft offenses 24 year old Gavin Brent used his personal blog to ‘let of steam’. He wrote that he was being mistreated by the officers who arrested him.
Apparently one of the officers had later told him why one of the arresting officers wasn’t present when Brent was charged: he was at home with his new-born baby. The blogger decided to end his post with a dramatic message:
“P.S. - D.C. Lloyd, God help your new-born baby”
Mr Brent explained to the courts that he simply meant that he hoped that the police officer would treat his new-born baby better than he had treated mr Brent. Detective constable Steve Lloyd, and his wife, read it differently and accused the blogger of threatening them and their child.
Brent claimed “You can write on websites because it’s freedom of speech.” The court disagreed and convicted the blogger for his ‘menacing’ rant and fined him £150 with £364 costs. The original blog entry has been removed but Brent is still blogging about his adventures so far.
It sometimes seems like bloggers can say anything they want on their blogs. The ‘Publish’ button is just one click away and mistakes are easily fixed. Besides, most blogs aren’t read by anyone except he blogger (and his mother?) so who cares what you write? Reality is that your words are out there for anyone to read and often forever. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can insult, slander or misrepresent subjects. Voicing an opinion and threatening are two very different things.
The fact that you can say and write anything on your blog doesn’t mean you should.
Written on April 29, 2008 – 11:59 pm
Eric Bun, business innovation consultant
Last weeks, multiple Dutch political parties debated about the potential of navigation devices in order to solve (or at least helping reduce) the traffic jams and congestion issues in the Netherlands. They argued about whether or not new generation of navigation devices should be able to reduce congestion problems and what kind of applications and functionalities would be required. In my opinion, it was a debate with a great value (though newspapers as well as bloggers don’t covered the debate!), both for society as manufacturers because it referred to a hot topic and the debate uncovered the urgency of navigation manufacturers to open up new markets and business models. The borderline: social computing (e.g. co-creation, crowdsourcing, mass participation or whatever buzzword you prefer) added to the next generation of navigation devices could help to inform and instruct drivers in a more adequate way resulting in a better transport flow and a better customer experience.
In this post, I would like to share some ideas regarding the next generation navigation devices and the relevancy and urgency for this mature market.
(more…)
Written on April 29, 2008 – 3:48 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“The most important migration of netvibes history starts today” says Tariq Krim on the Netvibes blog. “We are moving all Netvibes users to Ginger.” The Paris-based personalized start-up service now also offers the new functions - such as your public page, new widgets and a social media flavor - to users who used to work on Coriander. So that means my non-geeky friends have to switch as well.
True party picture with
Tariq Krim last week
Together with Facebook and LinkedIn, Netvibes is one of the few services that my friends who don’t care about the latest developments in the Web 2.0 use. They don’t like Twitter, couldn’t care less about Friendfeed and have never heard of Flickr. Yet when I showed them my Netvibes page, they were immediately convinced about its advantages. I hope the new version doesn’t confuse them, as it offer a wealth of new features. Especially as Netvibes imitations that are totally focused on simple user-interfaces keep popping up. Have a look at Dutch service Symbaloo for example.
Yet I don’t want to get too negative here. Tariq and his team have done a great job. At last week’s Netvibes party he has told me what kind of effort the switch takes - like translating content to 140 different languages -, and that was rather impressive. Moreover, for people who are more web-savvy than average, Ginger is for sure a real improvement. It looks slicker, offers good and public aggregation of all your online content, and if you have the need, you can see what your friends are adding to their “Netvibes Universe”.
So be aware when you open Netvibes today…
Written on April 29, 2008 – 9:47 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Boris with Rolf Skyberg in San Francisco
Rolf Skyberg is a ‘Disruptive Innovator’ at eBay.com. Last week I asked him about his opinion on what the future of eBay looks like, what he thought about the rumors that eBay might sell Skype and about his vision for the future of eBay in general.
Rolf pointed me to a blog post he wrote earlier this month titled “is your brand keeping you back?“. Although the post isn’t about eBay specifically it does give us an idea of what Rolf is thinking about at eBay. He told me he would hate to see Skype go and thinks that eBay could easily become more than the marketplace it is right now. If you see eBay simply and only as a marketplace then it is hard to see the added value of eBay. But if you see eBay as a service that provides rich interaction between people then things suddenly look very different.
eBay = exchange of goods
PayPal = exchange of money
Skype = exchange of conversations
PayPal is not JUST the money exchange engine that enables easy transactions for eBay but yet another product that enables interaction between people. eBay’s businesses aren’t just about the *exchange*, but specifically to enable and empower people to do things together. It enables the type of interaction that would be impossible to accomplish alone.
Skype would just be a third pillar for the eBay empire. If you look at eBay this way you could suddenly see them acquiring Twitter.com to enable the exchange of short messags and it making perfect sense.
Read the post at Rolf’s blog and exchange ‘McDonals’ with ‘eBay’ for an entertaining inside look into the future of eBay.
Written on April 28, 2008 – 8:13 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
While in San Francisco I had the chance to meet and interview someone who most people won’t ever meet. And if they do, they might not talk about it publicly. The person I interviewed is known to most people only as ‘Fille deLouer’. She is an active blogger (http://filledeloyer.wordpress.com/), twitter-er (http://twitter.com/fillealouer), works in the tech industry AND as an elite escort.
Yep, an elite escort.
She has paid sex with men.
There are lots of reasons to blog and twitter and one important one is to strengthen your online presence and do a little self-promotion. This surely can’t be the case with ‘Fille aLouer’ who is very strict about her privacy and doesn’t want to get known. So why does she do it? Why do people twitter in general? I wanted to find out.
I spent some time setting up a meeting with Fille but she refused to do so in order to protect her privacy. I did end up meeting her but will only tell you about that at the end of this story. First the interview:
My first question: are you real or just a blogger having fun with an alternate identity?
hello, Boris. Before I answer your first question I’d like to clear something up. It is very important for me to safeguard my identity but I actually do use twitter to promote my blog. I don’t think “self promotion” is a dirty word. And I don’t believe for a minute that most people who twitter aren’t using it as some form of self promotion. Nobody is that interested in status updates. I mean c’mon. Do I care if someone tweets that they can’t decide what shoes to wear? Not really. I do like knowing that someone’s put up a new post on their blog though. And I like being directed to a cool article or video or product review.
So, back to your original question: am I real. I don’t think some random blogger could make up half of the things I’ve experienced and talk about on my blog. I am, in fact, very real. But having been a part of the tech industry for the last several years I’m not surprised by this question. Skepticism seems to be endemic in the community. Whether it’s a healthy skepticism I don’t know. Sometimes it’s just annoying. I’ve gotten this question a lot.
Ok, can you tell me how you got started with this? (more…)
Written on April 27, 2008 – 11:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
San Francisco was flooded by Finnish companies last week. They’ve teamed up to organize a meeting at the uber-hip restaurant Foreign Cinema to meet with well-known web professionals as Loic le Meur, Scott Rafer and Howard Rheingold. Boris and me were there and really enjoyed meeting all these ambitious entrepreneurs who prove that Finland’s technology industry consists of more than just Nokia. This week I’ll highlight some of the companies, starting with XIHA Life. This is the world’s first multilingual social network, targeted at people living outside their home country.
Howard Rheingold speeching during Finnish meet-up
Juhani Polkko, VP Business Development, told me users can select not only their native language, but as many languages as they understand or want to learn, and the content on the site is filtered based on the preferences. So imagine that you’re an English-speaking person from Germany and have a friend in France. When you check out his profile, you’ll only see the English content on his site. The French comments and messages have been filtered out.
I like the idea of their service, as learning other languages or keeping up with the ones you speak a bit are valuable assets. Moreover, the numbers of languages they offer is impressive (see below). Though I’m slightly disappointed Polkko and his team have built another social network. Why didn’t they create an overlay service on top of existing social networks?
Polkko: “We are initially building a niche social network and target the people who have the natural need to use multiple languages in their everyday life, like expatriates and exchange students. The next step is to create mash-ups for content from other social media websites and apply our language recognition and filtering algorithms. This is somewhat limited because you would need to build the algorithms inside other networks such as Facebook, but they can be applied to all the content which is available through open APIs and XML-feeds, or other content which the users own the rights to.”
So whether you like XIHA or not, these Finnish guys do offer us a glimpse of the possibilities when social networks adopt open standards. We could filter out content we don’t understand and use every network in our own language - without excluding other people. Let’s hope it’s not an utopia.
Written on April 26, 2008 – 8:26 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When going to an enormous event as Web 2.0 Expo you know on beforehand that some keynotes and sessions are sponsored. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw company presentations of Yahoo, MySpace, Automattic and Dash. Yet what DID strike me was the quality of the non-sponsored parts of the program. Like O’Reilly’s passionate talk (more about that later) and the funny, witty and motivational speech of mr. Fake Steve Jobs himself, aka Dan Lyons. This Forbes journalist is a genuinely funny guy who managed to work an audience in a way that was rather impressive for that time of the day (really early).
Dan Lyons
Lyons presented as himself. For one time, he didn’t act like he was Steve Jobs. After making a couple of jokes to warm up the audience, he made a fool of people who tend to overreact when it comes to social media. “I just want to apologize in advance for the next 25 minutes, for the 25 minutes you’re never going to get back,” he said. “Please don’t Twitter attack me.”
Lyons started Fake Steve Jobs partly out of boredom - “Writing about guys like IBM all the time is … dull”. Yet he was also driven by fear - the media business was changing. Bloggers were winning ground on print media. So he started to join the other side: “I’m not old enough to retire”. He applied for Forbes online and was rejected.
“Please remember”, Lyons asked the audience, “Forbes said no. That’s very important”. Still Lyons couldn’t stop thinking about starting a blog. The idea of imitating a CEO first appeared in his mind when he noticed most CEO’s would act like they were writing a so-called transparent blog, yet all they did was spamming us with PR talk. Lyons: “What if somebody would go nuts?” That somebody turned out to be Steve Jobs, as “he takes himself too seriously and has no sense of humor. (..) When Jobs launched the iPhone he said Apple is changing the world. Come on, it’s a fucking cellphone.”
Fake Steve Jobs had the same attractive power on people as the real one, as Lyons built up a readership of 90,000 people in just six months. Moreover, people from all over the world started a man-hunt to track him down. The man leading the hunting masses: Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes. After another rejection from Forbes.com, Lyons sent Karlgaard a line - offering to write for Forbes. “He wrote back, ‘Oh, Fake Steve, you’re a genius, we’d love to hire you.” As Fake Steve Jobs, Lyons finally got his job at the online venue of Forbes.
The blog is a “life-changing” publication for Lyons. “I wake up excited every morning”. What he digs the most about his blog is that people actually build characters in the comments: “people with nicknames like Fake Vladimir Putin are performing on my blog”. According to Lyons, this kind of interaction is THE power of Web 2.0. A beautiful media future is lying ahead of us. We’ve built a strong foundation for the online dream, and it will get better “when the big media companies jump in”.
So all the funny remarks aside, Lyons did have a clear message. “Media business are focusing on the destruction of their business and therefore loose sight.” Since with the online revolution, the media experience becomes bigger, wider and richer. There are plenty of opportunities there. “We, the Web 2.0 attendees, are in the eye of the storm. No, we’re creating the storm”.
Lyons suddenly transformed a sharp and funny talk about his blog in an inspiring and motivating message to all the new media creators out there.
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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 of, the future of the Web. (
