Written on February 18, 2008 – 5:37 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A 25-year old web developer from Seattle just made my life as a blogger somewhat easier. On a daily basis I send out approximately ten emails with questions, meant for CEO’s, fellow bloggers and entrepreneurs, you name it. Because they’re all suffering from the information overload, some emails might be left unanswered. There’s of course the build-in read notification, yet it’s generally experienced as annoying and it creates a weird feeling of obligation. Now this guy from Seattle, Matthew Inman, created a service that makes it possible to monitor links I’ve send out.
In just six hours he built LinkBlip, a service that generates a trackable link. Just copy/paste it in your email and you’ll receive an email when the recipient has clicked on it. Now you at least know whether the unanswered email was seen by the recipient or not. Moreover, you know where he or she is based. It looks something like this:
There’s one downside to this service. The evil-minded now have a new way to bully someone with a enormous load of emails. All they have to do is submit the email addresses of potential victim and then post it on Twitter or something like that. Maybe Matthew will sacrifice one more hour of his spare time to build some sort of security measurement.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on February 11, 2008 – 1:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Pixels, tattoos on foreheads and Macbook covers all have one thing in common, you can sell them. Preferably by letting people bid. Alex Tew made his fortune by selling pixels, Karolyne Smith received $10k for walking around with an ink-ad ‘GoldenPalace.com’ above her eyes and Leah Culver (speaker at the Next Web conference btw) sold the space on her laptop cover for 150 dollars per square inch. Apparently, companies and consumers both love to support these stupid yet brilliant ideas. So why not turn them in to auctionings that support people and organizations that desperately need some money? Dutch marketeer Mark de Kock made this idea a reality by selling his 10,000th tweet on Twitter.
After pitching the idea to Robert Scoble, who was in Europe for LIFT08, he started an auction item on Ebay. Half of the final bid would be donated to the Dutch cancer fund. The second part would be transferred to the bank account of a charity named by the sponsor. The auction ended yesterday and guess who got the tweet: Next Web blogger Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. He bought it for EUR 152.50. Not an amazing result, yet not bad for a first time. Will this new way of gathering money for good causes become a new trend?
Let’s hear what Mark de Kock thinks about it. “For me it’s just an one time experiment although I believe in the power of an online platform and the possibilities it can bring to reach a big crowd in no time. For example, the Dutch Twitter scene once raised more than 20 laptops for Africa. There will be more of these types of new innovative ways to make money. The difference will be these will serve the masses and not just one persons wallet. If an idea is entertaining enough and serves people who need the money, it could turn into a success.”
Mark also says that when an online celebrity uses his of hers influence to promote an innovative idea, the outcome can exceed our wildest expectations. “Last night I saw a guy willing to pay 10 to 12 million dollars for a license plate. If that’s possible in the world we live in, we could also try and help organizations such as the Cancer Fund. Enjoy your richness on a personal level and and help others to do that as well.”
There are 30 tweets left till De Kock reaches the magic 10k tweet. His 301 followers will see Boris’ tweet, so my fellow blogger has paid 50 euro cents per view. As I’ve said, it’s a start and definitely worth a retry. Some tips for the person who wants to give it another shot:
- Pick someone who has 1000+ followers;
- Make sure his or hers tweets aren’t protected;
- Start weeks in advance, so that you have enough time to spark the hype fire;
- Get Arrington, Scoble or another influential to blog about it;
- Pick a ’sexy’ cause or something that just made the news bulletins.
- Create a dedicated blog or start a new category on your blog;
- Facebook is THE medium for spreading the word, kids love to do good.
Written on January 27, 2008 – 5:57 pm
David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom
A wonderful Twitter update badge you can customize to your heart’s delight and place on your blog, Facebook, MySpace… the slight drawback is that the site is almost entirely in Japanese, but don’t worry, I’ve found the English interface so you can make your own Twitter Balloon.
The important element that I love is the ability to go back and forward in time to follow the history of one’s twitterings, or tweets, so one can follow a conversation or thread of insights and ideas. These may admittedly be somewhat disjointed, but more interesting that simply having the ‘latest’ information presented. I can see an nice extension of this with a tweet balloon gallery, or even a mashup where those referenced by one user’s conversation can be linked to dynamically, or to follow how a topic or issue is being discussed.
Here’s one I created for my friend Boris:
Do your own thing at Korelab’s English Twitter Balloon Creation Page.
Written on January 25, 2008 – 12:06 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a writer and looking for more readers? Follow the example of the author of the ultimate birthday-gift book The Alchemist: Paul Coelho. He’s using filesharing networks as a way to promote his books.
Coelho thinks that giving people the possibility to swap his books for free, actually has a positive effect on sales. In a keynote speech (see below) at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he gave some strikingly good examples. When he uploaded the Russian translation of “The Alchemist”, sales in Russia went from around a 1.000 books per year to 100.000 and then to a million and more. The author said:
In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000. […]
I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility of reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. […]
So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions… And I created a site called The Pirate Coelho.
He thinks that this tactic will pay-off in other countries as well. I guess he’s right. Just imagine that you download his book and start reading it. After two chapters you’re captured by the book and obsessed to know how it ends. Trust me, Coelho is the kind of writer who can make you do that. Do you really want to print the whole book? No, you surf to Amazon.
Not sure if it works the same for business books since they’re generally not so captivating as thrillers.
Coelho however is preaching his new sales evangelism on the Pirate Coelho blog, where he also offers links to illegal copies of his books: “Believe it or not, the sales of the book increased a lot thanks to the Pirate Coelho site…”. See the rest of his interesting speech:
Written on January 15, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This article is written by affiliate- and search marketeer Eduard Blacquière.
A few days ago I noticed one of the most creative Google AdWords Ads I’ve ever seen:
But…it’s not allowed!
Just a couple of hours before I saw this remarkable AdWords ad, I went to a Google training about Google AdWords. They had used the exact same ad to illustrate that overuse of punctuation isn’t allowed.
Is Your AdWords Ad Remarkable?
This example illustrates the importance of the fact that you have to be remarkable. Your ad has to diverse itself from your competitors. Of course you run into restrictions of the Google AdWords policy, yet that’s where creativity comes in. (more…)
Written on January 15, 2008 – 12:03 am
Mike Sheetal, Next Web WebTipr in Japan
When writing a recent article about the biggest internet stories in Japan for 2007, I wrote about probably the biggest story of the year, hot-shot video site Nico Nico Douga. This site is uniquely Japanese and has some truly strange and bizarre content. By using time referenced text chat on top of the video feeds, the site manages to create a unique social landscape that western sites have yet to match.
This is the 7th most popular site in Japan after just 1 year of existence. Many of the funny jokes and comments are in Japanese, but I have still had a lot of people asking me to show them how to access the site.
When navigating a foreign language site you always have a few challenges but you can usually get by with a few guesses and some lucky clicking. For Nico Nico Douga, this is a bit more difficult than usual because you need to register first before you can see anything.
So, in order to help more people understand what this phenomenon is, I have put together this handy guide to registering and getting to the fun stuff so you can all benefit from my 6 years of clicking through Japanese websites.
(more…)
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