Written on July 29, 2008 – 6:20 pm
David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom
I first came across Next Web co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten when I stumbled upon his quirky site ‘Preople‘ in early 2005. It had an irrestible and simple hook - you’d compare yourself with others (or compare any two people or things) to see who was more famous, and you could email the results to people, and invite them to challenge others.
Preople also had a odd and endearing community of bloggers grow up around it (including myself). It was fun, and very viral, but I don’t think anyone too it too seriously, and it was really not doing very much for the past few years after the initial novelty had worn off. So, being the pragmatic entrepreneur he is, Boris decided he’d offload the site by - what else - selling it on EBay, with a minimum bid of $999. And the news is - it’s sold! The winning bid was $1025! Boris was unavaible for direct comment today, but rumours have circulated on Twitter that he’d blown the proceeds on an extensive lunch in Amsterdam.
Great minds think alike…
Now it may be a coincidence, but I was amazed by the similarity of this tool available at Wired - entitled the ‘Wired Celebrity Meter’, and has some very familiar sounding ideas. Here’s how the service is described: —
Are You Internet Famous?
How It Works
The Celebrity Meter scans your URLs and scores internet fame based on:
* webpages linking to you
* your friends across social networks (just Twitter and MySpace for now)
* pages linking to your photos
Being of 2008 rather than 2005 vintage, The Wired Celebrity Meter is of course an embeddable widget. Try it out for yourself… but be warned - if I am only scoring a few hundred fame points behind Kevin Rose, then there’s something odd going on, or perhaps I need a new agent…
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 21, 2008 – 3:31 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
After one day of flying and one day of recovering from a hectic week in San Francisco, I’m once again ready for some serious blogging. Let’s start with some old news that might still interest you. Last Wednesday, Patrick, Arjen, and I crashed a Reddit party. We weren’t on the list, but thought we could “add some value” anyway. As you might have read, Reddit has just became an open source project, so we decided to ask co-founder Steve Huffman some questions about this brave business decision - which turned out we totally own to Wired’s publisher Condé Nast Publications.
Undersigned, Steve Huffman, Patrick, and Arjen
Huffman: “Quite a large number of Reddit users are programmers, so we decided to leverage that by opening up the platform”. Right after Huffman and his team did that, they immediately saw the result they were hoping for: “TechCrunch has developed it’s own social news site - based on the Reddit source. That’s exactly the kind of stuff we were hoping for.” He suspects that open source is the future for Web 2.0, though he made a remark that makes me question that a bit: “I’m not sure whether we had opened up if Wired [Condé Nast Publications] hadn’t acquired us. We can take more risk nows”.
.. and organize better parties. We were amazed by the luxurious cocktail card and the fancy food Reddit served. It was fun seeing some good ol’ Web 2.0 people like iJustine, Pete Cashmore, Silicon Calley, and Scott Beale. See you next time in San Francisco!
Written on May 23, 2008 – 12:12 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Crowdsourcing is all about diversity. That’s the new message of Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired and an absolute hero for all the crowdsourcing experts. His upcoming book, “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business” is getting him some speaking gigs and for some he even has to cross the ocean. I was present at one of these occasions and saw the inspiring man speaking at SocialStrategyTalk, a new Amsterdam-based speakers event about the social web organized by Sogeti and CreativeCrowds. Howe used to show graphs to prove the power of crowdsourcing - “a stock photo used to cost $300, now only $1″ -, yet he feels this diminishes the power of people. “The term crowdsourcing is misleading, as it sounds like it’s all about a crowd. But this is not how it works”.
It seemed like Howe was a little fed up with telling the same story over and over. Also, he probably felt that some people were running away with the definition of crowdsourcing, giving it their own twist. The result was a 45-minute presentation about special people who can be seen as an example for the beauty of crowdsourcing. Howe: “I Love my people”.
Ever since Howe saw the first signs of the phenomenon later called crowdsourcing, it was about real and special people for him. When he was writing about the music industry, Howe was hanging out with some little rock kids, “a mess of bad creativity, but fun”. He noticed an attitude change. Young people used to say “I wanna make movies”, they now say “Let’s make a cool movie”. With the rise of MySpace, kids started creating their own quality content. Then Converse started its DIY campaign, asking consumers to create an ad for the Chuck Taylor brand. This turned out to be a real hit, which got Howe really excited. “It was full in my nostrils, I could feel this was an article“.
When Howe started looking for crowdsourcing examples, he found great people. Like Nick and Jake, two college drop-outs from Chicago who are avid designers and active members of a t-shirt design culture. In 2000, they started an online weekly t-shirt design competition called Threadless. Contestants could win their own shirt, and everybody else in the community would wear it. This community steadily grew and went viral at some point. Now it’s a profitable company selling 90.000 shirts a month. Most important thing: the users still decide which shirt will be printed. The result? They’ve never not sold out a t-shirt. By letting the community members vote, the selection process is fine tuned to perfection.
If the story of Threadless already amazes you, you’d better hold on to yourself. As Howe summed up some more stunning examples of the power of crowdsourcing. (more…)
Written on March 26, 2008 – 10:23 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You probably know the Amazon Mechanical Turk. It’s a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes up for the inabilities of computer programs. You can buy some human intelligence for prices of a few cents. Oh, and human intelligence might sound good, but most of the tasks are repetitive and boring. Combine that with the low prices and you understand why some critics call the Mechanical Turk a ‘virtual sweatshop‘.
Let’s face it, new working technologies and labor systems often arouse negative feelings. We don’t like things to change. News about outsourcing journalistic work frightens us since it doesn’t match with our beliefs about the profession of journalism.
Artist Aaron Koblin finds his inspiration in trends and changes in this information age. According to his website, the San Francisco- based artist ‘playfully turns lots of data into lots of information’ in order to raise questions.
On Wired I’ve noticed a video about his latest project The Sheep Market. He asked the ‘providers’ of The Mechanical Turk to ‘draw a sheep facing to the left’ for 2 dollar cents. He received 10,000 sheeps and combined them into one art piece. From far away, it looks like a some sort of bar code, but when you come closer you notice the small drawings: data turns into info.
Written on March 14, 2008 – 1:13 pm
Jeroen Bakker,
Free, as in ‘for nothing’, is the theme of the latest issue of Wired. The issue, centered around ‘Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business‘ by editor in chief Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame, has sparked a long list of blog posts on every aspect of ‘free’. In this post I’d like to list some of my favorite ways of offering something to the market for free . Of course, lots of start-ups are focused on selling advertising directly or through Adsense, but there are other options to consider. The list isn’t complete of course, so please feel free to comment with other ideas!
Offer products for free and extract data from its use to sell
The best example I think is Newsgator. Newsgator offers several RSS readers and services (Newsgator, NetNewsWire, FeedDemon) and used to charge for them - they had actual revenue by charging for their products! Recently however, Newsgator decided to offer all readers for free. That way they gather a lot more data, which they will aggregate and offer as ‘attiontion data’ to publishers, journalists and other people interested in buzz. A risky way of transforming a business, but also one that could inspire a lot of other start-ups to rethink their sources of income.
If you want to learn more about this concept you should head over to the podcast section of Educators Corner by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, where Mitch Kapor talks about his new start-up Foxmarks. Foxmarks enables users to synchronise different lists of bookmarks for free and plans to develop business cases on top of the many millions of bookmarks they aggregate through their product.
Offer the main product for free, charge for complementary products
This is the main thinking behind some of the recent acquisitions of open source products like MySQL. When you offer a product for free (MySQL), if you’re lucky, you’ll see a growing demand in your complementary products (like the servers that SUN offers).
Google is another great example: they need more pages to plave relevant ads on, so news, e-mail, search results, book pages, product search are great ways to serve more pages to more people and thus having more space to put ads on. For an excellent article on this, head over to Strategy+Business for ‘The Google Enigma‘ by Nicholas G. Carr.
(more…)
Written on January 1, 2008 – 10:55 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Every year it takes webmasters a few days (or months!) to realize that it is a new year and they should update the copyright notices at the bottom of their websites. I know, it is trivial, but I just can’t help but smile when I see the most expensive and well watched frontpage of the world display ‘2007′ when it is actually 2008
Google and Yahoo: both wrong
CNN and Reuters: Reuters wins!
Wired and Techcrunch: both wrong
Apple and Microsoft: sorry Apple fans, both wrong
See any other funny examples of outdated websites?
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