Born on the Web

According to Facebook ads, there are 1 462 760 Belgian facebook members and 378 200 facebook members from the Netherlands. What a huge difference …

Does this show the popularity of Hyves in The Netherlands?

 

Quote by miss rogue from citizen agency. They travel around speaking on conferences, but also have customers, how do you handle this?

Question:

How do you guys get any work done with all of the things you are involved in?

Answer:

I wasn’t aware there was a difference between the two…I realized long ago that cutting back on the latter, rendered the former banal. The mojo comes from the being part of the community one serves. If a company prefers an agency that brainstorms in boardrooms and comes up with ideas, they should hire them.

There is nothing better then being challenged by presentations, conferences and like-minded people to keep you sharp. If you are regularly updated with fresh knowledge and insides the work goes much faster and almost automatically.

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By Tom Coates

Community guidlines - a mish mash of tips and interesting theories. A lot of this theories are directly copied from Tom Coates his presentation at the future of web apps. So credit goes to him. But his slides are simply so true and so valuable I couldn't have let them out. I hope you don't mind, Tom...

A 79 year old silver surfer is addicted to Youtube. He posts his first video blog asking for for some help and encouragement and tells us what he'll mostly do on his blog is "bitch and grumble about life in general in the perspective of an old man". Euhrm, fun. About a week later there are 178 video responses (!) by other youtube users and 6409 text responses. I didn't think of youtube yet as a video blogging and conversation platform. What I use it mostly for, and most people I guess, is to watch funny clips and old tv shows, but it seems that there's a whole lot of videoblogging and conversations going on. I did a search to see if some other people had noticed this and the Technology Evangelist had a post up 'Youtube Becoming a User Contributes Video Blogging Platform'. They say that if all the copyrighted material should be deleted from youtube because of legal reasons, the site will still be a huge success because of the thriving videoblogging community. Youtube is an ideal latform for starting video dialogs because they host the video for you, provide easy schmeazy upload features and allready have a very active community.

I suppose that all people that read this blog have a good life. I know I do. I've got people that love me, live in a stable environment and get all the chances to develop myself socially an culturally. But off course millions and millions of people on this globe live in much worse conditions. The bridge is big a charity effort that wants to unite people in a creative way to build a better future for others. Everyone can help build a mile of a virtual bridge around the world and for each mile companies like Adobe will give one dollar to a charity that you care about the most. It's a great initiative and there are already pretty beautyfull creations and words added to the bridge. Currently there are 585 miles built and 24317 to go. So, get creative, let your heart speak and contribute.
Get this video and more at MySpace.com And on a professional note: the site is very well executed and the concept is strong. We cannot speak of consumer generated content here, but a better term could be carer generated content. Good use of audio and video. The messages that welcome you speak immediately grab your attention and make you clear what it's about on a very personal way. I like the visual style to, but it took some time. The colours are very strange, even somewhat ugly. This could be deliberate so the site looks more spontaneous and from the hart then it would when the site would look very clean an over styled. This style makes the barrier for posting graphics yourself a bit lower. It's also worth noting how they integrate MySpace. The Bridge organisation has their own Myspace and user are invited to link to their own Myspace pages and most notably to download backgrounds and banners for your Myspace pace. The bridge - building a virtual bridge around the planet

Amy Jo Kim, social architect (I like that term), has given an interesting presentation at Etech. This is probably not that recent, but I only stumbled upon it today. She has interesting slides how we can use game mechanics to encourage interaction in social software. A set of 5 simple rules that can be applied and are already used in a lot of social software:

1. Collecting
2. Earning points
3. Feedback
4. Exchanges
5. Customization

We-make-money-not-art gives a nice round-up of the presentation. Links:

• AJK presentation
• presentation roundup
• Amy Jo kim her blog
• Rewarding users for contributing data

I'm a heavy reader of Nicholas Carr's Blog: Rough Type. I mostly don't agree with his rather controversial statements, but he does always bring up some interesting points. In his article the death of wikipedia, he attacks wikipedia and its stricter rules about editing articles. Read the article but also read the interesting discussion going on in the comments. They are at least as valuable as the post itself. Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia goes into discussion with Nicholas. If you're interested in the evolution of communities and user-generated content, this is a must read. My comments on Nicholas his statement: Try looking it from the end-users perspective, Wikipedia is a great source of information, I use it a lot and it never disappointed me. I'm not part of the community, I don't care how they come to such great content. But the content is very useful to me and that is what matters for me.

Yesterday evening I got an invitation to the "sphere" blog search engine. When I was testing it out, I noticed what a great tool a blog search engine can be in the search for information. Next to my blog, there is, believe me, some valuable information on blogs. Actually I look at a blog engine as a community tool. It searches the blogosphere community. So you can compare with the search function in Wikipedia. So a tool that gives you easy access to all the information on all the blogs in the whole world, that's a power tool ! http://www.sphere.com/

I simply love my music, and always on the look for new bands. Being a member of last.fm for a while, I discovered a lot of unknown, great bands such as M83. And today I found out that pandora.com (thanks to techcrunch,an interactive internet radio, switched from being a paid service to a free service. You just give in one band you like, he starts playing songs in the same genre you decide if you like the song or not. Great for discovering new bands. It would be great if they had a supporting community like last.fm. I love their flash application.