The Next Web

Checkser.com: checklists database in the making

Written on February 27, 2008 – 7:09 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Checkser is a service that allows people to create public checklists, whatever the subject. Founder Marijn Deurloo came up with the idea during his brainstorm with his mentor, only a few weeks ago, and started to develop it right-a-way. The result is a very simple and clean-looking site.

You can look up checklists by browsing through the tags, user history pages or using the search engine. Some useful checklists I have found: a fishing trip list, Bottle soccer, Financial Management and a Web standards checklist.

KillerStartups reviewed the service as well, and they were pretty enthusiastic about it. Yet they did miss something: ‘Some more web 2.0 features would also be nice, such as user profiles’. I’ve emailed Deurloo to find out if he will add features like that. He replied: “Checkser is currently linked to the openID-initiative for linking to profiles, so authors can make themselves known by entering their openID-id. A link to their openID profile is then added to the “history”-page of a checklist. In the future, more social features like ratings will be added.”

I hope he will, since the anonymous approach might actually threaten the quality of the content. Especially since the checklists have a ‘read more’ link that the creator of the list can use to link to his own page. Deurloo deliberately added that function so that checklists can be used as teasers for companies. Yet it could be too tempting for gambling sites and other infamous low quality content sites to use it as an extra ad space.

So I’ve asked Deurloo how he will make sure that the quality of the checklist will remain good. Deurloo: “I’m hoping that the same mechanism that works well for Wikipedia will also work for checklists. Users help keeping the quality up, by being able to revert to previous versions of checklists and branching off those.” The self-control approach doesn’t really work yet, since the tag ‘test‘ contains 34 test checklists. More traffic and users might end this problem.

Unlike Wikipedia, Checkser does have a business model. It’s not much yet, Deurloo uses the Amazon affiliate program. “By suggesting relevant books to the checklists, I hope a little money can be made.” Makes sense, since he attracts a Getting Things Done crowd, and they’re generally eager to buy books.

But Deurloo has more good plans for the future: “As several businesses have already asked me, I will be creating a “pro”-version with company-private checklists for use on intranets for a small subscription fee. Kind of like the Basecamp and Backpack websites do.” So Deurloo can soon mark the ‘create pro version’ point on the ‘How to run a successful Internet service’.

I hope you like that post!

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checklists, checkser, getting things done, lifehacking, wikipedia

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LinkBlip makes your digital life easier by tracking links

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.

How to, lifehacking, linkblip, tool

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