Written on March 28, 2008 – 4:07 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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Although Web 3.0 seems to be coming closer by the day, typical 2.0 initiatives are still launched on a daily bases. Just for the record, I follow Calacanis’ definition of Web 3.0: balancing the ‘wisdom of crowds’ by embracing experts. A good example is Topicle, a search community with a pool of small search engines that use the human intelligence of experts.
So I just registered to ReStyleme, a service that allows users to rate other users’ clothing style. What pleads for the ReStyleMe is that they don’t just offer a dull 1 to 10 rating system but actually make it possible to judge in detail. To be more specific, you can rate the hair style, body style (?), accessories, makeup, eye glasses, dental style, facial hair, clothing and tattoos. Moreover, it’s possible to pinpoint good and bad points on the picture. And of course, users can leave comments as well. Like this one, from DieWeissenRose about steph19812006:
You need to cheer up some! :) try straightening or curling your hair. Also wear clothes that are your size.
KillerStartUps is raving about this service in their review:
RestyleMe fills a gap for a website that’s specifically built for actually useful style advice. (..) It utilizes Web 2.0 features that makes it user-friendly and fun to provide or obtain style advice.
Yet you could also see their remark as negative. If you think about it: who wants a style advice based on the wisdom of the crowds? I mean, a business man might want to see if other business people dig his suit. And a goth teenager only cares about the dark view of other goths. ReStyleMe doesn’t offer this possibility. You can only sort the style results by age, geographical location and sex.
Moreover, if every body pays attention to the fashion sense of the majority, that would be disastrous for creativity. People would just adapt their style to the generally safe (= dull) judgments of Average Joe. So I hope ReStyleMe will soon create some more options to select opinions. Otherwise they’re just making the world a bit more gray.
Don’t agree with me? Express your anger here by giving me a thumbs down for my clothes.. or hair. Whatever you want.
Written on March 19, 2008 – 10:22 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Setting up panels: why are conference organizers doing this? So you have four entrepreneurs on stage, all really good in what they do - I assume. You ask a moderator to do her job. And here we go: an entrepreneur gives a mediocre answer, the others are just nodding. The moderator tries to spark a fire, yet the only daring thing the entrepreneurs do is trying to speak louder than the other. In my experience, it often goes like that.
Same thing with today’s panel: Simon McDermott (Attentio), Rodrigo Sepúlveda (Vpod.tv), Andrej Nabergoj (Noovo) and Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (From the blog you’re reading now) are all skilled entrepreneurs. Some of them are even gifted speakers. Moderator Colette Ballou from Ballou PR is doing the best she can - making jokes, asking daring questions. Yet like aways, the result of a panel isn’t noteworthy.
I rather see these businessmen give four well-prepared short presentations. Discussion can follow afterwards, or on a backchannel (like the coffee break). Only then they’ll manage to share their expertise in an exciting and fairly thorough way.
Oh, I was just about to press publish, yet I wanted to share this cool quote: “starting a company is like having sex for the first time. You don’t know how it works, , it takes very long, but you’ll discover along the way”, stated Rodrigo Sepúlveda. Boris’ reply: “There’s one difference, if you have more sex you take more time.”
Left to right: Andrej, Rodrigo, Simon, Colette and Boris
Written on March 16, 2008 – 12:43 pm
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
This is a guest post by Stefan Fountain from Dutch start-up Soocial.
By now most will have read about the Zuckerberg revolt (video here, and more), the release of Clickpass, and all the other big news. Yet I noticed something equally remarkable at the SXSW conference in Texas last week.
Building Portable Social Networks Panel - with Jeremy Keith, Chris Messina, Leslie Chicoine, Joseph Smarr, David Recordon
My impression of SXSW has been generally very good, the quality of the panels outstanding, yet the most important part of visiting this conference was - surprise! - meeting people. Walking around and having conversations with the likes of JavaScript heroes John Resig (jQuery), Thomas Fuchs (script.aculo.us), Sam Stephenson (Prototype), Chris Messina (OAuth evangelist), Simon Willison (OpenID evangelist). At parties I met people from Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! in various stages of intoxication. I even got some quick peeks at Billy Bob Thornton and Moby.
It wasn’t until the last day at the closing party when I was talking to a hard-to-understand German that I realized something. This was the first European I had spoken to. We met the great guys from Brighton-based Clearleft and quite a few other British guys, but where were the main-land Europeans? Perhaps I missed them, yet I’m judging from the panels, parties we went to and after speaking to over a hundred people. The statistics support my theory. My contact at SXSW confirms that 3 percent of the attendees came from the European mainland. Although the statistics on traffics to sxsw.com probably don’t say much, cumulative European visits is around 16 percent.
For what is arguably the most important tech event of the year, is the lack of European involvement a sign of something greater? Is it the current political climate, lack of European startups, overkill of our collective chauvinism or <enter any far-fetched reason here>? I don’t know, but what I do think it’s important to be present either to influence someone’s views, or to be influenced and inspired yourself.
So I would encourage European startups and established companies to head over to SXSW next year as it is well worth the money, jet lag, the occasional loud Americans, fat food and other pre-conceptions largely encountered on this trip. I think it’s time we head over the pond to learn, meet and share our own wealth of knowledge.
Written on March 6, 2008 – 3:44 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might know, Meghan McCain - the daughter of the Republican presidential candidate - has a blog. So what, you probably think, it’s just a random PR thing. And you’re totally right. She even hired a photographer and an independent producer to give the blog a hip and professional look and feel. Together they form the blogettes.
Meghan loves the campaign of her father as well as music. Therefore she picks a ’song of the day’ and regularly posts playlists. You know you won’t find anything more shocking than that the daughter of a politician listens to a song called ‘the Angry Mob’. Though despite the boring an marketing minded content, the blog does reveal something shocking, at least for me.
Yesterday my parents hosted a BBQ at our cabin in Sedona, Arizona for the press who have been traveling with us on the campaign.
Excuse me? Journalists are having dinner with a presidential candidate? Am I that naive that I always thought journalists should be independent and not too cousy with politicians? Sure, when I was working at the United Nations I made sure that the vibe between me and a politician was ok, but we didn’t barbecue on the shore of the East River! The pictures of the laughing ‘press guys’, chilling with the pretty blond daughter of McCain make my old-fashioned romantic idea (I guess?) of journalism fall apart.
And so, without even the intention to actually reveal anything of the truth behind a presidential campaign, Meghan’s blog does surprise me. I wish every slick PR publication did that.
Written on February 24, 2008 – 2:45 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Mike Mann is rethinking domain tasting. He’s the founder of BuyDomains.com and now works as a VC for WashingtonVC. Domain tasting, or front running*, is the act of registering a domain name which you know somebody else is intending to register. Earlier, we reported that Network Solutions automatically registered domain names that people checked for its availability and that Google would make it harder for domain tasting companies to show up in the search results.
So Mann is rethinking a rather touchy subject. In an email he send to his personal mailing list, he said that ‘domain tasting is indiscriminate and buyers end up having their robots purchase other peoples’ clear trademarks, as well as a lot of lewdly suggestive names, or names that once resolved to questionable content. So it’s nothing I’d want my team to take part in’.
Yet that’s where the rethinking begins. And then Mann changes his mind:
In the past I thought nobody should do it. Today I think it should actually be done by others carefully for one simple reason: It’s good for the economy. People are typing in and clicking on legacy domain links for expired domains, and if they get a 404 error it’s a waste of time, energy and bandwidth - and nobody gets paid, however if it lands on a tasting speculators PPC page or monetizable site then someone is getting paid, and they can pay their employees, taxes, and tips at the local restaurant, etc. So domain tasting while lame in most respects is still good for the economy.
At first you might think: he’s right! But then, you hopefully realize that it’s just a justification thing for what his fellow domain traders do. Domain tasting isn’t good for economy, it hurts the ecomony. Why? For a number of reasons:
- Imagine somebody wants to start a new site with a name he absolutely loves, then it turns out that this domain is registered by a domain tasting company. That probably scares him off, so domain tasting actually blocks creativity and entrepreneurship;
- People lose their faith in the Internet, since the domain tasting pages are nothing more than a collection of sponsored links. Some even use pop-ups, automatic bookmark scripts or whatnot. When people don’t trust the web anymore, they will spend less time and less money online;
- Those ‘monetizable sites’ clutter the web and make it harder for users to find what they’re actually looking for.
Please Mr. Mann, start rethinking your thinking on domain tasting again.
* Update: Eric Litman provided some definitions of domain tasting and front running in the comments.
Written on January 24, 2008 – 5:23 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Digg team in their new office
Last night Kevin Rose posted an announcement on the official Digg Blog that the Digg algorithm, responsible for determining if your Digg will reach the front page, has been updated. They continuously work on the algorithm to make sure it is less sensitive to fraud attempts. This means that if the same group of people repeatedly Diggs the same group of URLs these Diggs are considered less valuable then Diggs from random groups of people.
Some people think these changes mean that new Digg members without any friends will have a higher change of getting to the front page of Digg than older members with more friends. This could lead to more fraud attempts using new and fake accounts.
Although that may well happen there is something else to consider. There is both a short and long term benefit to being Dugg. The short term benefit is only achieved if your Digged page becomes popular and makes it to the front page. Then you get an avalanche of random traffic from Digg. This is known as the Digg effect and can crash servers. The benefit of having a couple of thousand random visitors to your server has been disputed many times before. These visitors tend to visit your webpage for about a second or less and never come back. They just want to see what the fuss is all about.
“61% of your visits go to posts older than a month”
The long term benefit is bigger and undervalued. More and more people start to use alternatives to Google to find stuff on the Web. Michael Arrington has regularly stated that he uses Del.icio.us more than Google to find interesting content. The same goes for Digg. If you look at our visitor stats you see a fair amount of traffic coming from the Digg search engine. These aren’t visitors who notice our posts in the upcoming section of technology but people who search for a certain subject they have genuine interest in, get a bunch of previously Digged pages and pick our URL because it has received maybe 10 Diggs compared to the other URLs that received only one Digg. They come over, read our articles and stick around. That is the kind of traffic we want.
In general, it is better to concentrate on more insightful and thorough articles instead of quick news items. You would think that people try to stay up-to-date on your blog and that old news is forgotten and people only read the newer posts but this is not true. Deborah Schultz recently gave me these numbers based on research she did for 6 apart:
61% of your visits go to posts older than a month
37% of your visits go to posts from this month
12% of your visits go to current news
So if your goal is to get quality visitors you should try to write interesting and timeless articles and not just focus on breaking news. And make sure that people can find your older articles by being well represented in archives at Del.icio.us, Digg en similar sites. The new algorithm makes it harder to get your Digged page to the front page, but so what? The long term benefits far outweigh the short term benefits. My advice; keep digging and don’t worry too much about the front page.
After all, there is a good chance (61%) that by the time you read this it will be old news…
Written on January 23, 2008 – 4:41 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Here is a brilliant video about the VPAD. It is a Smart device for Deaf people which allows them to communicate with sign language and video through the internet. The gadget is made by Viable and currently in beta. The deaf and HOH (Hard of Hearing) community is relatively small but very interested. Apparently a normal Skype or iChat video connection isn’t enough to let them communicate with sign language. As they explain in the video the speed of communication via sign language is 3 times as fast as normal speech. This means that they need at least a 30 frames per second video feed unless they want to miss half the words.
So think about that for a minute. I never believed that the future of data input would be voice recognition. Unless the circumstances are perfect, and they never are, speech recognition is too slow and error prone. I’m in a noisy office surrounded by talking people and music all day. No way that voice recognition will ever work for me. But sign language would be a lot easier to recognize for a computer than sound. And sign language is probably (I hope!) easier to learn than typing with 10 fingers, which I can’t do either. And that would mean that just by gesturing at my computer I would be able to input text 3 times faster than talking to it. Now THAT would work!
Look at this video not just for the gadget or deaf people but see it as a demo for how one day you, or your kids, will be inputting text into the computer:
Video by Vincent Everts, made during CES 2008.
Written on January 23, 2008 – 2:46 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
A good headline does a lot for an article and sometimes it can be attractive to make things look bigger than they are. Titles like “Did an UFO steal my milk?” just work better than “Milk missing from doorstep”. We all understand that and use it to our advantage. Just like I just did with this article title.
But maybe ZDNet went a bit too far when they titled a post “Did Wi-Fi interference cause Boeing 777 crash?“. A questionable source, Nina Anderson, author of ‘Worse Than Global Warming — Wave Technology’ speculates that “interference from rogue radio frequencies could have influenced the aircraft’s “brain”, causing one or more of its electronically-controlled systems — such as the auto-pilot, auto-throttle and power management — to fail”.
ZDNet explains that “The recent BA038 crash-landing at Heathrow airport may have been caused by interference from wireless networks, which affected the aircraft’s electronically controlled power and automated flight systems.”. In other words: don’t you EVER use Wi-Fi because you might crash a plane!
Gordon Brown
in reality, and explained later in the article, no such thing could happen. All wiring in these aircrafts is heavily shielded against radiation, radio signals and stray currents that might interfere. So there is actually no need to worry about your Wi-Fi usage in airplanes.
Fortunately there is a more interesting conspiracy theory offered in the comments by Joe Ralph:
The plane allegedly flew over or very close to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s car as it came into the airport. It’s certainly not beyond question that his convoy was using ‘electronic jamming’ equipment (to block remote detonation of roadside bombs etc) and that would be far stronger than any wifi signal.
Now THAT is a juicy developing story!
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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. (
