Written on August 8, 2008 – 2:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Norwegian start-up SecondBrain, currently in second beta phase, has welcomed its 10,000th user. In the ideal situation, every user would build its own collections and libraries of content. Not sure if they’re all doing that but I did write a positive review about the service in June. I was charmed by SecondBrain because it collects all your online content in a safe and well-designed place. All it takes is entering your credentials to various services once, and then SecondBrain automatically syncs all your blog posts, bookmarks, Google Docs, Flickr pics, and whatnot every time you log in.
So the service is doing ok, 10,000 users is not bad at all, but the most interesting news that SecondBrain has released lately is that they’ve added integration with ten more services (including FriendFeed, Facebook, (!) Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, Tumblr, Qik, Goodreads and Behance). Especially due to the FriendFeed and Facebook integration, SecondBrain becomes a solid archiving tool for all your online activity.
In general, online content is something that disappears with time. Twitter tweets, messages on Facebook walls, and a Qik video are things you might stumble on accidentally after a while. But they’re not properly archived. SecondBrain does store all this content in one place, which is also easy searchable. For me, that’s the added value of SecondBrain: it’s my online library. Like founder Lars Teigen said in a comment on my last post about SecondBrain:
We are definitely going for the organizers and collectors out there and want to be a service where you can build your own personal content library, with all the good content that you collect over time from the various services that you use, and help you organize it, search in it, and share [..]
But what if SecondBrain goes bankrupt?
The only touchy issue is trust. What if SecondBrain ceases to exist? Bankruptcy, crashed servers, you name it. Then my whole library will be gone. I trust them for now, especially since my life doesn’t depend on it. Yet I’m sure not everybody is as light-hearted as I am. So here’s your challenge, Mr. Teigen, convince your potentials users that your service is trustworthy.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 23, 2008 – 12:11 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During the past few months, I’ve seen a specific start-up keep popping up: SecondBrain. It promised me to aggregate all my content in order to organize life 2.0. “Yeah yeah”, I thought, “Seen it, been there, done that - never worked for me”. So my attention went to one of the other twenty start-ups that are brought under my attention on a daily basis.
But last week, I received an invite from another blogger and Boris sent me a press release about the beta 2 launch of SecondBrain. So I decided to give SecondBrain a second chance (quite a corny line, uh?). Turns out that I might actually use this service. Why? Well, it does a really good job synchronizing the majority of the Web 2.0 services - from Flickr to Digg and from Wordpress to Google Docs - ALL your content in stored in one huge media library. For some reason, this gives me a safe feeling. I have it all stored in one place, like a giant bookcase with my photo albums, video tapes, books, articles, and lots of uh.. bookmarks.
Apart from the safe feeling, in the end - that’s just personal, there are more advantages, particularly in the field of organizing:
- SecondBrain generates one tag cloud for all your online stuff.
- You can create collections, regardless of file types. This is easy for reference.
- There’s a rather solid search engine.
Founder Lars Teigen has told Mashable that SecondBrain focuses on organizing your content first, after that, they’ll add the unavoidable social layers. The new features of Beta 2 prove his point: the navigation has improved, you now have 1GB for personal file uploads and, ok, there’s a share function.
Personally, I don’t need a social touch to SecondBrain. For that purpose, I use the services with which SB is synchronizing. I just want to look up all my saved content about my favorite band, hobby, or travel destination - just like a real bookshelf.
Written on April 17, 2008 – 9:31 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The work of a man who changed science and the way many people look at the world and its history is being published online. Organizers from Cambridge University Library were noble enough to make the first draft of Charles Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species” and some 20,000 items plus 90,000 images available to the public on darwin-online.org.uk.
Looking into the works of the legendary scientist used to be a privilege for scholars. But with this release, everyone can learn more about how Darwin formulated his controversial theory of evolution. The collection also contains, amongst other things, family pictures, newspaper scraps and reviews of his books.
“This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” said John van Wyhe, director of the project, to Reuters.
“The release of his papers online marks a revolution in the public’s access to - and hopefully appreciation of - one of the most important collections of primary materials in the history of science.”
It sure does, and I hope other Universities will follow. So that in five years from now, it will be really normal to look up some personal notes and manuscripts from a much-admired scientist, writer, or journalist. And for that matter.., blogger.
Written on January 28, 2008 – 2:15 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, the president of the National Library of France, is French. And it must be noted that the French are, well, different when it comes to culture and language. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jeanneney has written a book about Google’s potential to misrepresent, or even damage, the world’s cultural heritage. Jeanneney argues that Google’s unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad.
He is concerned about Google’s role in the world and fears that Europes identity and culture is under attack by the English oriented focus of Google. He also challenges Google’s assertion that its venture offers a source of universal knowledge. Jeanneney finds such a claim spurious and utopian. I think it is a bit ambitious to call your own venture ‘a source of universal knowledge’ and a little ambition never killed anyone is better than no ambition at all.
Jeanneney pleas for the European community to create their own search engine to counter Google’s which is I don’t have much faith in. There have been several attempts to start competing search engines. In fact, not a day goes by without the launch of another ‘Google Killer’. In reality people haven’t been very interested in local search engines.
We attended the launch of Accoona, a very ambitious project to build THE European Search Engine, in Paris last year. Accoona has lots of cash ($100 million in funding!) and is headed by Eckhard Pfeiffer who is the former CEO of Compaq Computers. Among the guest were Clinton (via Live video feed) and Kasparov, a whole bunch of journalists and enough champagne to get us all drunk, twice.
The service was launched as THE European answer to Google with local version in every county in Europe. I don’t remember much of the party but I do know it was the last time I ever heard of Accoona. So much for Europe’s Search Engine.
Either way, I suggest you read ‘Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge‘ and get a fresh look at Google and its claims to become the source of universal knowledge and this excellent and more in-depth review of the book.
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