Written on May 7, 2008 – 8:00 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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You might have read about this on Mike Butcher’s TechCrunch UK: Hobnox, a Germany-based start-up that aims to become the next big thing for people in the creative industries. It’s an online music and video platform where users can watch, connect, collaborate and create. Co-founder David Noël sent me an invite so I decided to give it a shot, as his plans sounded very ambitious. What struck me the most when testing the service were the über cool flash-based audio and video Noxtools. I’ve made a screen shot of the audio Noxtool to give you an idea:
Once you’ve figured this tool out it’s possible to upload your masterworks to a personal library. You can then create a playlist that you can publish to the stage for everyone to see. There are also three Channels which are maintained by Hobnox’s own editorial team and streamed in high quality. This team is screening the work of the community to find some hidden talent.
It’s an original concept, yet I’m afraid it’s not original enough to function as a closed platform. To me it sounds like MySpace on steroids. The only part of the service I haven’t seen on the web so far are the super sophisticated Noxtools that bring the music and video editing to the browser. Therefore, the guys from Hobnox should work on integration with other services. I don’t feel like starting another blog, I’d rather import one. Same goes for pictures (Flickr), movies (YouTube), songs (MySpace), and calendar (Upcoming). If you want to show your ‘old work’ on Hobnox you’ll have to upload it all over again, or link to it from your blog.
I’ve e-mailed David to ask whether this will change or not. He replied: “Good point. We plan to add API’s to sync with other services but they haven’t been created yet. We’re still working down the list of features. Users can simply upload their content into a Hobnox profile.”
They’d better hurry, since David also told me Hobnox will launch a rather impressive marketing campaign this summer, aiming it UK, US and main-land Europe. “We will start a contest in the early summer with which contestants can win a 25K€ artist development package. We are also looking for other means of directly approaching creative people. Bar camps, trade fairs, events etcetera, all centered around music, film, and culture.”
Hobnox is one of the coolest start-ups I’ve seen lately - the design, high quality Web Tv and Noxtools certainly make an impression. If they take the walls of their garden down, I’m sure they can attract the creative crowd they’re aiming for.
Written on April 25, 2008 – 2:50 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Do you tag your photos on Flickr? If you are a loyal tagger, you may consider yourself member of a small groups of Flickr users. One that has however, “an outsized influence on the overall Flickr experience”, said Kakul Srivastava, director of product management of Flickr. During the “Next Generation of Tagging: Searching and Discovering a Better User Experience” Web 2.0 Expo session, she discussed enhancing the user experience through tagging and geotagging.
In the practice of tagging, she sees four levels of sophistication, namely:
- First there is the “I exist” level. You just tag pictures to make them findable for yourself
- The second level is all about making your photographs findable for others. You want those Flickr users to know you exist
- Thirdly: wow! You find other people exist too! Let’s interact! So you start annotating your friends by adding tags. We should thank Facebook for this, as they made tagging people normal.
- The fourth level of sophistication consists of tagging objects within pictures.
So what’s the results of all this happy taggin’? According to Srivastava, “sly Russian mathematical magic” will take place. That might sound rather abstract, so let me name some examples. Because of extensive tagging, the Flickr algorithm can start clustering tags so that the meaning of a certain tags is disambiguated. Let’s use a classic example here: are you looking for the Hilton in Paris or for a Chihuahua-carrying utterly famous blonde?
Another example of taking tagging to next level is checking hot tags. By doing this, you can see what’s hot and happening, and where. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that last week’s hottest tags in the US was “popemobile“. This has a link with the last advantage Srivastava mentioned: geotagging. 68 million Flickr pics are geotagged, thanks to clustering you can multiply that number four of five. What leaves the Flickr community with a stunning 100,000 places on the world that can be viewed by checking out related Flickr photos.
So where do we go from here? Srivastava polled some people from her team and predicted that tagging objects would become more popular and complex. The metadata is becoming more structured, making it able to look for specifics types of airplanes - to name an example. Also, interaction in tagging is here to stay. But what I consider to be most important consequence of good-tagging behavior is the ability to see what trends are emerging throughout the world. Like the popemobile tag, some tags - or clusters of them - will tell stories, maybe even news. And that’s what makes a structured web really fascinating.
Written on April 24, 2008 – 8:58 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Andy Denmark is one of the founders of TripIt and their VP Engineering. Tripit, The online travel assistant that received $5.1M in funding earlier this week, is a service that helps you manage your trips. The main interface for getting information into their service is email. Instead of copy/pasting and submitting to a webbased form you simply forward all your confirmation messages to plans@tripit.com. Their software then analyzes the content of the message and extracts all important information and plots in on an easy to read itinerary.
During his presentation today Andy challenged us to come up with more email centric interfaces like this. The benefits are clear. Almost everyone who uses the web has email. In fact, probably more people have access to email than access to the web.
Right now I use TwitterMail.com to send and receive messages for Twitter. I use email to send most of the photos I make to Flickr and I use email (in the background) to sync appointments with my partners via iCal. I also use email to post blogs now and then and instead of using a notebook I send my notes to an emailaccounts I reserve for just that purpose.
Some people even use email to browse the web:
Tripit.com makes it clear that email is a great interface for services and it is inspiring to hear their ideas about this. I can imagine that email is a great way to work with social networking sites. Instead of manually entering someone’s name and emailaddress into a website why not simply cc connect@linkedin.com when I email them? LinkedIn could parse this message, connect the sender (from address) and receiver (to address) and send us a confirmation after that. The first message could be archived with the account as an easy reminder of how you met. Simply, easy and scalable.
Any other ideas for using email as an interface?
Written on April 22, 2008 – 5:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Robin Goldberg from
BlurbYesterday Boris and me visited a pre-Web 2.0 Expo meet-up, organized by Flickr and blurb. We were welcomed by Robin Goldberg, she is the SVP Marketing and Business Development of blurb. After a drink, she pitched the service, and we were pretty impressed - despite the hideous name of the service.
The San Francisco-based company celebrates the good ol’ books by allowing anyone customizable photo-orientated books. It launched in October 2007 and differ from competitors like Lulu with the ultra-slick look of the books. Goldberg: “Whenever I tell people about our product, they react positive. Yet when I show them the books they get really enthusiastic”. I can see why, since the books I saw yesterday reminded me of the photo books I’d seen earlier at bookstore Borders. They’re also equally expensive with prices ranging from 12,95 to 159,95 dollar. By downloading their software program, making a book becomes pretty easy.
A Blurb book
Cool features are importing your Flickr pics and blog posts. You can either print a book to caress your beloved Flickr pics or sell your work for profit in the online bookstore of Blurb.
Blurb has just opened a European office - with a printer - in Amsterdam. So the service becomes more accessible for us Europeans.
I like this service as it gives you an opportunity to turn your online content into a touchable project. Some photographers are working daily on a beautiful collection of photos on Flickr, yet what will be left of that in 30 years? When creating a book, these photographers can show their work to their grandparents as well as their (future) children and at the same time own a gorgeous product.
I’m thinking of creating a book yearly, to capture the highlights and remember them in a rather fashionable way.
Written on February 27, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
On The Next Web, we try to give our articles a hip and stylish look by using Flickr pics instead of just another logo. Or as a visitor once said in the comments: “Tryin’ too hard to be cool and artsy”. Well, I think we’re doing pretty good job, you may judge for yourself.
Anyway, I’ve stumbled upon two handy plugins that make being ‘cool’ and ‘artsy’ with Flickr pics even easier. One for Wordpress and one for iPhoto.
Flickr and Wordpress
Australian problogger Darren Rowse wrote about Photo Dropper, a Wordpress plugin that finds Flickr Creative Commons licensed images all from within your Wordpress Dashboard. You can choose three different sizes and attribution links are automatically added underneath the images to comply with the Creative Commons license rules. Get the plugin here.
Flickr and iPhoto
Another great plugin that makes it possible to upload your iPhoto pictures. I’ve found it on Jaap Stronks’ blog and was delighted, since it will lower the barrier for me to upload photos to Flickr. I used to just import them in iPhoto, but now I can put them on Flickr with a few clicks as well.
A free iPhoto export plugin for Flickr. This provides a convenient way to upload your iPhoto descriptions, titles, keywords (tags), and ratings along with your photos. It also supports sets (yay!) and preserves GPS tags and other EXIF data. Flickr is a semi-free photo sharing service/site.
Get FFXporter here.
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