Written on May 15, 2008 – 11:20 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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When you own a blog, you’re probably always looking for ways to create a bond with your readers. If your readers feel connected to you, they’ll probably comment and read more. Not to mention the power of word of mouth. A good way to create this sort of commitment is an integrated social network. There are several Wordpress plugins offering extra functions with a social network feel to it, yet it takes a lot of time, knowledge and effort to modify them to your needs. So I’m glad to tell you a new start-up has come along which offers an instant community for your convenience.
Patrick, Andreas Stephan from Six Groups, and undersigned
German-based Six Groups has developed an easy tool that allows you to include a community by just copy/pasting a javascript snippet. This adds a bar at the top of your page, showing a community lifestream, the number of users that are online and a sign-up button. You can customize the design by selecting a theme. As a user you have access to the regular social networks features, like a wall, lifestream and a personal library for photos and text documents. All in all, it’s a pretty neat community solution for bloggers and site owners who don’t have the budget for a totally-customized social network.
I met the Six Groups founders last night at the Facebook Developer Garage after party in Hamburg. They’re presenting at the Next08 conference today and already have an alpha version of their tool running on the Next08 site (So check that one out). When I was talking to co-founder Andreas Stephan, I immediately started thinking about the “yet another sign-up page”-tiredness. I’ve signed up to enough social networks already. So I said to him I’d only blog about his start-up if he promised to support OpenID. He did, so let’s see whether Six Groups lives up to it.
Written on April 25, 2008 – 7:12 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg just told the audience at Web 2.0 Expo that Wordpress.com has launched a “(possibly) related functions” option. Mullenweg: “We have over 10 million pageviews a day to permalink pages. After you’ve read the article on a permalink page, you might get lost due to the bad navigation. It isn’t a good experience.” So Mullenweg and his 19 Automattic employees developed a function that suggests possibly related articles from your own blog, and then from some other blogs who have also turned the function on. “It’s like advertising, but with content”, Mullenweg said.
Automattic teamed up with Sphere - the widget service who does the same for the whole blogosphere - and is planning to offer it to the self-hosted Wordpress.org blogs too. Mullenweg believes the service will be successful, as “who hasn’t lost a day due to the YouTube’s related videos?”. I absolutely dig this move by Wordpress - as obvious at it is - since it allow smaller bloggers to get their writings out there. It’s the democratization of the medium and makes sure good quality content doesn’t get lost.
By the way, check out this cool photo blog theme called “Monotone“. It adjusts the page to the color and width of the photo and Mullenweg seemed to be pretty proud of it.
Written on March 18, 2008 – 9:58 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A few weeks ago I wrote that Wordpress isn’t going to be the next social network, as some bloggers like Anne Zelenka claimed. I based this statement on several experiences with co-writers. Sometimes I work with people who are passionate about what they do and want to share their knowledge about a certain matter with the world. Rightfully so, they start blogging. And I’m there to help them out with the first steps of Wordpress.
Most of the times I tell them it’s not that hard to grasp since writing posts is the only thing they are planning to do. Yet when they have a first look at the Dashboard they generally say it doesn’t look simple at all. I get why they say that, since the overabundance of options on the ‘Write’ page can be overwhelming.
Luckily Matt Mullenweg’s team is smart enough to interview Wordpress users and you can tell by looking at the first sneak peek screenshots of the new Wordpress, version 2.5:
The new write screen (..) displays the most common fields in a way that makes posting incredibly easy. Additional options are hidden away until you need them. The new Write screen anticipates the natural flow of the way you write, and is smart enough to remember the way you left it so that your preferred writing environment is always quickly available. The new visual editor even has a handy full-screen mode to help block out distractions while composing your newest post.
They’ve not just gave the Write screen a visual update, it’s the whole Dashboard that looks better. When those new users I was talking about open the Dashboard of the new Wordpress, they just see four tabs:
So Mullenweg might catch up and actually have a Dashboard that might be understandable for people who hardly get Microsoft Office. If he can do that, I’ll change my mind about Wordpress as the next social network. immediately. After a few days of feedback, Mullenweg will set a final release date. Just like him, I can’t wait!
Written on March 4, 2008 – 5:31 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the post I wrote about Wordpress NOT being the next social network, just because it’s too complicated for the larger public? I still think about it the same way, yet I see more and more initiatives that show that Wordpress is becoming an even larger player in the field of web publishing.
The most inspiring post on this subject is written by Raj Dash on the blog Performancing. He describes 48 unique ways to use Wordpress:
As someone who has both written small, custom CMSes from scratch as well as evaluated million-dollar professional CMSes for large corporations, WordPress’ robustness never ceases to amaze me.
According to Dash, the key to the many ways Wordpress can be used lies in five components: custom theme, custom code tweaks, custom or widely-available plugins, custom fields per post and custom code to use the custom fields. After making this clear he sums up some interesting Wordpress-powered sites, like city guides, webcasting stations and web portfolios.
Yet the simplest idea strikes me the most. Developers like Charlene from Essential Keystrokes use Wordpress as an easy content management system. Have a look at Furniture Warehouse, this simple website is build with Wordpress, not that you can tell though. It’s perfect for small companies that want a good-looking site that is easy to customize. They used to hire a web master or pay a huge license fee for a complicated CMS, now they can just ask an experienced blogger to install Wordpress with a good looking theme.
It might not be a bad idea if Wordpress would start to exploit this new usage of their publishing platform. With some minor adjustments - like a function that disables the comments functions - Wordpress could easily evolve to a popular content management system as well.
Some useful links
Written on February 27, 2008 – 12:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
On The Next Web, we try to give our articles a hip and stylish look by using Flickr pics instead of just another logo. Or as a visitor once said in the comments: “Tryin’ too hard to be cool and artsy”. Well, I think we’re doing pretty good job, you may judge for yourself.
Anyway, I’ve stumbled upon two handy plugins that make being ‘cool’ and ‘artsy’ with Flickr pics even easier. One for Wordpress and one for iPhoto.
Flickr and Wordpress
Australian problogger Darren Rowse wrote about Photo Dropper, a Wordpress plugin that finds Flickr Creative Commons licensed images all from within your Wordpress Dashboard. You can choose three different sizes and attribution links are automatically added underneath the images to comply with the Creative Commons license rules. Get the plugin here.
Flickr and iPhoto
Another great plugin that makes it possible to upload your iPhoto pictures. I’ve found it on Jaap Stronks’ blog and was delighted, since it will lower the barrier for me to upload photos to Flickr. I used to just import them in iPhoto, but now I can put them on Flickr with a few clicks as well.
A free iPhoto export plugin for Flickr. This provides a convenient way to upload your iPhoto descriptions, titles, keywords (tags), and ratings along with your photos. It also supports sets (yay!) and preserves GPS tags and other EXIF data. Flickr is a semi-free photo sharing service/site.
Get FFXporter here.
Written on February 19, 2008 – 9:54 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
We Love WordPress
Last week I was browsing through our WordPress Admin here and noticed the “Hello Dolly” plugin. This is a plugin that comes pre-installed with every WordPress install. When activated you will randomly see a lyric from Hello, Dolly in the upper right of your admin screen on every page. As you can imagine this isn’t a very useful plugin. Then I decided to take the “Hello Dolly” plugin and make it do something useful: display tips.
I wrote a blog post on my personal blog and sent an update to Twitter asking for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tips. Then I opened up a Google Spreadsheet where people could insert and edit the tips. Within 30 minutes I had received hundreds of tips from several friendly SEO experts (complete list below). Together we wrote, collected and fine-tuned more than 250 tips. We ended up with a nice collection of exactly “100 SEO Tips” which is also the title of the Plugin we launch today.
Even if you know a lot about SEO this plugin is still fun to install. It reminds you, casually, of what you already know but sometimes forget. So, install it, share it, link back here and if you have a few tips of your own please do share them with us so we can include them in the next version of the plugin.
Download: http://thenextweb.org/100-seo-tips.zip
Install: Download the plugin, unzip, upload to server in directory /wp-content/plugins/ and then activate in Wordpress Management. Tips will appear in top right corner of WordPress admin.
Please let us know if you installed it by leaving a comment here with your blog url! Or even better, blog about it and and send us a trackback.
Special thanks to the following people who helped collect the tips: David Petherick, Joop Dorresteijn, Nikki Pilkington , Joery Bruijntjes, Gerben Bouwhuis and Eduard Blacquière .
Written on January 21, 2008 – 2:19 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Matt Mullenweg has just announced that upload space at Wordpress.com has been increased 60 times from 50 Megabytes to 3 Gigabytes. Mullenweg writes “To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. We’re doing the same thing for free”.
Previously the 50 megabyte limit made it necessary for a lot of serious bloggers to host Wordpress on their own services. With this upgrade they might be tempted to start hosting at Wordpress.com again. And it IS tempting to move away from a dedicated server to the Wordpress hosting platform. As Mullenweg notes “Over the past year we’ve developed our file infrastructure, replication, backup, caching, and S3-backed storage to the point where we don’t feel like we need to artificially limit what you folks are able to upload just to keep up with growth”.
Written on January 2, 2008 – 6:59 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile?”. With that question, Anne Zelenka started a post on GigaOM that created a fairly big buzz in the blogosphere (143 comments and trackback plus 541 diggs). She wrote about DiSO, a project that by using OpenID as an identifier and Wordpress as publishing platform wants to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” With some sophisticated blogroll-related plugins, bloggers would be able to build a social networking place that’s customizable to the max, since it’s their own place. It’s an idea by Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency.
It sounds like a great idea, especially now everybody seems to look for ways to connect their abundance of social services. Remember what Marc Canter said in Paris on Le Web 3: ‘We ALL want social systems that DO connect with other social systems.
However, Zelenka added a critical remark in her post, stating that not everybody wants one place to present their digital identity. Some people prefer several places to present themselves in different ways for different audiences.
I believe that DiSO might get popular, but I doubt whether it will get picked up on a massive scale. It seems like a nice tool for the geeky crowd out there. The ones that actually care about their on-line identity and think outside the borders of their group of friends and acquaintances. Who already have a well-styled and written personal blog. For them it’s a nice extra.
For the large audience however, it’s just a little too complicated. Yet for them, there are also interesting blog tools emerging. Tools that make blogging more accessible and look better than the old-fashioned Blogger.com design. Have a look at Blogonize for example. It’s basically an AJAXified blogging platform that makes it easier for users to create ‘one heck of a blog’ and thus might stimulate a huge crowd to finally start blogging.
Tumblr also fits perfectly into the trend. Ok, it’s not 100% blogging, but it sure looks like it. They say that when blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks. It’s another easy way for users to easily share what they create and find on the web, in a gorgeous way.
So yes, blogging will get more popular for the normal users, since it’s a way for them to present themselves in a more personal way. But the process of installing a blog on a server and activating plugins is just a little too much to ask from them. Or will the guys from DiSo find a more accessible way to create the so-wanted personal social networkingtool?
Tip: Read this inspiring article by Hugh MacLeod in which he explains why he prefers blogging over social networks.
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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. (
