So goal for second half next year is to get a sponsored (foreign work visas with exception of the greencard need to be sponsored) job in in the (new)media industrie in Silicon Alley in New York (The clearer the goal, the easier it is). As far as I could find it’s not that easy, because strangly enough the States do not like ‘talented, high-educated, well motivated’ foreigners, for reasons still unclear, but easy goals are too easy anyway.

So, if anyone knows anyone who has experience with or working in New York or getting a (sponsored) visa to work in the States, let me know.

And second question, if anyone is up for lunch in London, or in Amsterdam from 1 to 7 july, drop me a line

update: apparently there is something like a J1 exchange visa, allowing people from other countries to exchange for work experience with people from the US. Also found this wonderful program: MountBatten I’m still looking for the catch here, sounds quite good (besides that I would have to work fulltime for a year, for a trainee pay, but hey, its America)

(this is an part of an essay, I liked the image of Foucault and the Lolcat, so I just had to put something online to support it)

From the surface Facebook might look like just another toy for teens to waste their time on, but Facebook is much more than that. Not only is the audience comprised of much more than purely teens, the amount of users -70 million- and the time spent on it - the 6th most trafficked website in the world- make it a platform that is a seriously big player in the world of online destinations. Tom Hodgkinson, journalist for the Guardian, writes in his article about Facebook With friends like these… about the size and the goals of Facebook:

Furthermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don’t have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK’s? Thiel and the rest [shareholders of Facebook] have created their own country, a country of consumers. (Hodgkinson 2008)

With Facebook, state and commerce seem to have found a solution to the problem of decentralization that they had been dealing with on the web. Where they already had solved some of their problems by building in surveillance possibilities in the hardware, with Facebook they can directly see what users are doing by following every click they make on this closed platform. I’ll try to present you with some background of Facebook as both a surveillance and marketing tool and we will try to relate the ideas of Foucault, biopolitics, segmentation and the Panopticon to the way Facebook allows its users to interact on the platform and itself the surveillance all this.

With Facebook as a closed platform, commerce no longer needed to need tools anymore to track users on different internet sites, for as long as the user stayed on Facebook, they could be followed on every page they visited. From research done by Harvey Jones and José Hiram Soltren for their article Facebook: Threats to Privacy, we can understand that on average nearly 90% of the students of their researched universities (including MIT and Harvard) had a Facebook account (Jones/ Hirman Solten 2005 [14]) and although Facebook has a privacy option to disallow ‘strangers’ from viewing specific information (Jones/ Hirman Solten 2005 [14]) this setting does not interfere with what Facebook itself can see; their privacy statement also leaves no doubts:

When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features. (Facebook 2007)

It is pretty clear that those surveillance powers of getting all the user data are used by marketers to up its fullest potential, and according to Tom Hodgkinson the government in the form of the CIA also managed to get onboard; he writes:

Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. (Hodgkingson 2008)

And although the CIA were only indirectly related to Facebook in this article it would be of no surprise if the CIA were indeed capable of having the same information as Facebook’s commercial partners.

Foucault and Facebook
If we take another example that Foucault uses in his book Discipline and Punish, namely measures that have to be taken when a plague hits town, we can see another kind of social control happening on Facebook, the user-to-user control. An interesting feature on Facebook is its News Feed, which is on the opening page for everyone who has logged in and shows everything that your friends have done on Facebook: whether they have added new friends, uploaded photos, or even if their relations are still working out; and thereby reminds us both of the ideas of the Panopticon as to the segmentation after a plague, as Foucault writes: ‘Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name and showing himself when asked - it is the great review of the living and the dead’ A quite somber image for the profile pages users create for themselves, but it could be used as a way to think about how social networks (especially those with a reach of more than 90% in certain groups) force their members to behave in a certain way. If we see each profile page as the representation of a human being, and we know that the News Feed allows everyone in the group to know about all the changes a person makes, then we can see the order Foucault mentioned:

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded. (Foucault 1977 [140])

Two things are different though; first, the users join voluntarily (although is it a free choice to not join, when you know you will miss out on an activity 90% of your friends are joining?) and second the unknown guard is replaced by all your known friends that could be watching, although there is no way to find out which ones exactly, because Facebook does not give insight into who is watching your profile. It is here that we choose to be part of a self-created Panopticon, we are the inmates of a self-inflicted social prison; Foucault states: ‘that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.’ (Foucault 1990 [31]) The current Internet users do not need power of state, or seduction by marketing anymore to keep them in control; rather they happily agree with self-surveillance to create an online society of social normalization.

Facebook is a dream platform for extracting marketing data –and possibly security data- because it no longer has to deal with the problem of decentralization; from the moment the users show up on one of Facebook’s pages their every move can be tracked and traced. Facebook’s privacy policy also leaves no doubt that they will. The way Facebook is created also allows us to see it as a sort of social prison or Panopticon and use the work of Foucault to understand better how social surveillance creates a status of social normalization.

Short essay on Marc Auge

In this short essay I will try to answer the question as to whether the Internet can also be seen as a non-place; a place where ideas and concepts travel between real places and the virtual places of computers, Internet and the minds of humans sitting at their desk waiting for new information to come out of the gap. To answer this question I will use the ideas stated by Marc Auge in his book Non-places about and see if it can also be applied for this particular situation.

First I will write an account of the execution of my idea of a trip to Epping Forest, hereby using the London public transport to get there. Because I wanted to include some friends on this trip I had to share my idea first and let the group shape it into a workable plan. Therefore information had to travel through the Internet to reach different places where it reached certain people and let them work with it so we created a mutual plan to go to a place. I shall try to describe the path that this idea travelled from a virtual message on a screen to a real meeting in London

Secondly I will give a short overview of the ideas of Auge on super-modernity and see how these ideas can be used to understand certain details of my story.

Account of a journey

After seeing photos of a trip to Epping Forest on a friend’s Facebook profile, I sent him a message on how to get there. Next I discussed the idea of visiting that place with some friends I met in the kitchen. Because most commented positively about the idea I decided to create a group message on Facebook with a time and location to meet up. The idea hereby traveled from virtual space -the digital photos- to real space –the kitchen- to virtual space – the group message. On it’s way it both changed its information available online, as well as the people it met in real life.

The message on Facebook contained several links to other places of interest on the Internet. There was a link to the photo site Flickr displaying all the interesting pictures of the place: a link to the Wikipedia article on the area describing its history and its characteristics; a link to Google Maps with an overview of the area; and a link to the website of the City of London where a travel map on the area was available. All different links with different information about the same location, seen by different people on different locations but with one common connection - it was in front of a computer screen.

After my invitation was sent out, there were three replies from people who couldn’t make it and five from those who could. Very early in the morning (3 AM) on the day we would go a new reply came from one of the accompanying people: after a late night kitchen meet-up they had decided that 10am was too early and that eleven o’clock sounded a much better time to go. Again a message that came from a meeting in real space led to a message in virtual space that had direct implications in the real space and time: namely an hour change in schedule.

After I released my idea on the Internet it was no longer my own, it had became also the idea of the others who felt connected. The central overview thereby moved from a human to a computer network and got a bit lost. The people, who lived in the same real space of my house, had the chance to connect without using the virtual medium of the Internet. And although they responded on the original message with a reply of the new time, those who weren’t at that midnight meeting could run the risk of missing out on information, if that information would not manage to jump across the gap between real and virtual space. Luckily for them I woke up early enough to see this risk and check with the outsiders if we all had the same information. Hereby I used another screen based devise that was also capable of sending information, the phone. By using a second device I raised the possibility of information actually reaching its destination. And it seemed that it worked, for one person at least, who got the information and was able to respond to it by changing her original plan. A second person however did not reply.

This could mean that the second person got the Facebook or text message with the new time and had changed her plans accordingly but hadn’t replied, or that the information never left the machines and she was still acting on old information and would be an hour too early. The last solution left was that of a medium that only worked if there was an instant reply, namely the call and speak function of the telephone. When I tried that I indeed managed to get to speak to a very sleepy person that hadn’t heard of the change of plans but was able to adapt to it at that specific moment.

Half an hour later the idea that had only traveled through the minds of people by mail, instant messaging, spoken word, text-messages and telephone calls created a meet up in a real space, creating a group that was ready to move through space and time to reach a place where distance nor time was of first concern.

Critical Analysis

The next thing I will do is compare my account of this story with the ideas of Auge, but first let’s see what these ideas are. Auge sees four key points to believe we are now living in a time of super modernity (Auge, p.34)

1. Overabundance of the present. Although we are aware of history, we no longer have the feeling that we live in a certain time, we live now, and history is always on our heels. We try to see us of what we are in the light of what we are no longer (Auge, p.26)
2. The change of scale. Not only has there been an upward change in scale – the first travel to the moon, satellites that turn around the earth each day – the world has become smaller in the same time too – London to Paris in 45 minutes by plane, satellite television and Internet that allow us to watch events in real time while they happen on the other side of the planet. (Auge, p.31)
3. The proliferation of imagined and imaginary references. Famous people on TV become like relatives to us, we know where they live, how they are doing, what is happening in their lives, although we have never and will never meet them in person. The same goes for all the images we see around us, Tokyo, New York, San Francisco; we have a feeling that we know those places although we actually never went there. (Auge, p.32)
4. The acceleration of means of transport. Thanks to the airplane, we can go to places that were previously only a piece of information to us e.g. ‘that it is sunny’. Or we can take the tube and go underground in the suburbs only to go outside again in the middle of the historical center.

Overabundance of the present can be found in the fact that the reason to go was not an historical interest in the place, but more digital photos only one week old, which in the end resulted in new digital photos only a few weeks later. Another point can be made of the way the trip was organized; no longer did people have to wait for the time information had traveled from the sender to the receiver. At the moment the sender had sent the information is was already available for the receiver.

The change of scale can be found in the way that Internet changes communication even more than the letter, telegraph and telephone did. Not only does it allow for real time communication, it also gives the possibility to communicate with a group, in different times and different locations. The subject that is worked on –in this case an idea to go somewhere- can be changed, altered and moved by any of the group’s members from any location (if Internet connection is available) at any time.

The proliferation of imagined and imaginary references can be found in the information that was available about this place that none of us had ever visited. Photos from people we knew that had already been there gave the possibility to imagine how it would be to be there. This together with the available historic data of the area, the satellite images and the other available photos gave us so much information that it felt like we had lived there all our lives.

The acceleration of means of transport meant that we didn’t even need to come together to share information and ideas. The ideas and plans of one person were available for all others at the moment one was capable of formulating these ideas in written text. The transportation of ideas with the speed of light, literarily removed the distance between sender and receiver (although one could argue that the change of the medium from oral to text also caused an altered perception of the idea itself, distance was removed at a certain cost).

As we can see here, if we modify Auge’s idea about super modernity from real space as tubes and highways to virtual spaces as computers and telephones (and also telegraph and mail) his ideas can still be useful. However as my example in the last paragraph of my story states: the miscommunication of the idea through different forms of media states has to remind us that if distance, space and time get close to zero, old problems might disappear but previously non-existent problems can arise.

Biography

Auge, Marc

Non Places – Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

London: Verso 1995

Before I went to London I was working as a designer on a great new web-project Zomoto. Last month the site finally came in public beta, for all of us to play with. The site has some great features, personally I’m most fan, of the a-synchrone click search system. Although at first glance maybe a bit hard, but it’s so much more fun than the now most used drop-down boxes. An other industry shaker is the (yet to come) world famous Zomotex, thanks to some mighty math algabra mixed by the magicians at Pascolo it is now possible to get a pretty good indication of what each car might be worth. And last thing the complete transparent profile pages of each project member. And before I’ll be overflown with tons of fan-mail the last three months the design of the site came from the careful hands of Steven de Haer

Let me know what you think

Enormous media hype around the “jesusphopne” proved it once again, there is only one leading company in consumer technology, and that is Apple. In current time there is probably no other company that is more capable of selling a piece of the future than these Californian dream-weavers. Once bought, however, the great promise turns out to be quite a normal thing - certainly not as good as the futurists promised you. But it is already too late. So, why do we keep forgiving them for selling overpriced products than are just not quite there yet?

To get some answers on that question, I will talk you trough three ways of how the future is often used as an excuse to manipulate us.

• First, the future is used to force us to change our habits for own benefit. To be able to live in the future they say you’ll have to change the way of working and living.
• Second, future is used to keep us from complaining: although the current is not that good, it will better get once the future will have arrived. So - be strong, keep on going, on and everything will be all right.
• Third, the future is used as a shared dream of mankind: one day we’ll all be united, so if you want the best for the world stay with us.

As you can see all reasons have some overlapping and can be found in both business and governmental ways of explaining their choices for the future.

An example of changing our habits for the best is the different way the iPhone uses for text input. David Pogue of the New York Times writes: “Text entry is not the iPhone’s strong suit. The Blackberry won’t be going away anytime soon”. Not only that iPhone is slower than the Blackberry, it’s also different. The multi-touch interface of the new iPhone is a good example of getting something new, and losing some good features from the past. On one hand, you get a larger screen and a more flexible interface to operate your phone. On the other hand, you lose a way of feeling with your fingers what you are doing. If asked, many 14 year olds are capable of typing text messages on their phone without even looking. This mastered skill is mainly based on the fact that they can actually feel the shape and location of the buttons they are pushing, and without any physical buttons to hit this skill will soon be one of the past.

Later on, Porgue even falls for the “In the future everything will be better” dogma. After writing about some errors and flaws he ends his article on the iPhone concluding that things may not be so good at the moment, but the will get better soon. “On the other hand, both the iPhone and its network will improve. Apple points out that unlike other cell phones, this one can and will be enhanced with free software updates. That’s good, because I encountered a couple of tiny bugs and one freeze. A future iPhone model will be able to exploit AT&T’s newer, much faster data network, which is now available in 160 cities.” Just beyond the horizon lies a land of milk and honey, where Internet is fast, photos are sharp and interfaces are workable.

Apple is not really selling you a product that is created for the current times. When you buy it, you merely get a beta version of the next model and pay Apple for their research and development. My point, however, is not that Apple makes bad products, but that we should judge them (just as almost any other product) on their value for money on this moment, and not how good they might become someday.

Than again, if you look at it from a more sociological perspective, the use of the future concept can also have a positive side. Historian Allan Nevis wrote in his research on American history that we are, although also bound by history, even more bound by our hope for the future. And despite the fact that Apple is not keeping up with their promises in present-day, it does succeed however in structurally promising us a better future.

What leads me to the following conclusion: if we would not believe in Apple’s branding strategy and judge their products like most other products, we would have to live without the shared hope for a brighter future for all. Quirks saw it already coming in the last century. Whenever the future failed, as it often did during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, appeal was made to yet another new future patching up the miscarriage op previous predictions. (Quirks, 1989, p.178)

resources:

Nevins, A., 1971:398 in Quirks, J.J. The history of the future

Pogue, D. “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype”, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/technology/circuits/27pogue.html

Quirks, J. J. “The history of the future”. in Carey, J. W. “Communication as a culture”, 1989, Unwin Hyman

iPhone video: Lenart J. Kučić

Since many people blogged this event already, I’ll just stick to points worth mentioning.

• Jared Spool warned once again for feature creep, in many occasions less features is more
• You can’t make a checklist for experience design, It needs to be learned by try and error
• Organise failure parties, this way people shouldn’t be afraid to fail, and feel more motivated to experiment with new ways of doing things

Have a 5 year vision of the future, that way you’ll be able to check each move if its the right way or not

• Johnatan Woo mentioned that products are people too, they are threatened with emotion, and should thereby be build with emotion too
• The most desing ideas of Google Calendar came by interviewing only eight people
• Create stars to sail your ship by (check the stars of flickr)
• Experience is the product, and cool is what is should be
• Cameron Moll mentioned the practile test if a site has been designed ok: make a print screen, grey scale it, blur it, check it; do you still understand how it works?
• Flickr stats: 11 million users, 1 billion photo’s and 2000 photos uploaded every minute
• Tom Coates had a talk as clean and clear as his blog, lucky for us he wrote down many insightful points of his talk

Programme (just for me to remember)
Thursday flying at 10 AM, arriving at 10.10 AM (hooray for time difference )
Take the train from Gatwick to Brighton
check in at the St. Christopher’s (location)
Check out Brighton
pre-party at Heist (location
)
friday: d.Construct (location)
friday night: After party (location)

Saterday Barcamp (location)

Sunday Barcamp (location)
Sunday fly back at 19.35 Gatwick

Looks like I never have to walk more than a few hundred meters

Queen- Brighton Rock

The solution is to spent each day a few minutes in trowing away stuff. Delete those saved posts on Bloglines that aren’t interesting or relevant anymore. Throw away all your old received newsletters. Cancel your subscriptions on Flickr streams of people who turned out to be more in to cats than great pics. Remove your read articles from toread in del.icio.us. Free yourself from the clutter… start working on it now! here is my howto guide!

twitter: check your twitter stream, the persons who you are following and you don’t know as a friend have they said anything useful the last ten post, if not, check them to shut up

Flickr Check your Flickr stream, the contacts you are following and don’t know from real live, have the post anything useful the last month, and why where you following them.. If not remove them (i would like to be friends with Flickr people without having their photos on my front page, please Flickr hear my call)

mail Check your mailbox daily, for the following weeks with every mail from a few days old ask yourself shall I ever search my mailbox for this mail, if not, probably remove it. Check your newsletters do you read them at all? if not, just remove them..

Feed reader Order yourself that you have to delete one post every time you save. And never more than 100 post from one feed, in the end you should end up with a list of 100 quality posts that reflect your interest perfectly.. (If there was an end)

Bookmarks check your bookmark site (like Del.icio.us) just check some links at a random page, follow them all and decide which to keep and which to trow away. With Del.icio.us you can visit the page, click right (if you have the plug-in installed) and delete the page from your bookmarks.

Digg Last time I checked my digged pages, I found out I had more that 15 pages! But deleting stuff in Digg goes slowly and painful, not sure how to fight this system yet..

more to reads
Master Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload
Coping With Information Overload & Keeping Up with Your Profession
The Cure for Information Overload
Information Overload

Anyone any more tips on fighting information overload?

Problem: Only a few sites are multilingual, and therefore most of them will miss the mass-market in Europe

Reason 1: It is harder to build a multilingual site
So why are there so few sites multilingual.. well first thing it’s harder to build, you can’t use “hard coded” text anymore, everything needs to be variable, that is a problem that is a bit harder to solve, so I leave that up to the tech guys.

Reason 2: It’s expensive to hire translators
To get a site multilingual you need people to translate it, and this is expensive stuff, and many not all, don’t understand much of the web stuff, so you have to let someone check all their translations too.

Solution: Build a site that enables everyone to make translations in their own language
Many of the words on websites are used over and over again everywhere, words and sentences as “click here”, “subscribe”, “search”, “login”, “add to cart” etc. All those words are also already translated by people a million times. So wouldn’t it be a great idea to save all these translations in one big database where everyone can add new translations, and ask for more translations. If that file is downloadable you can just check all the words you need, load them in your database and your site is multilingual from day one!

Bonus features: Packages and Plugins
You can make packages too like “shop”, “forum”, “web2.0 site” etc. And you can check how many languages you want to download at first. And someone could build a Wordpress plug in (well there is one already) and a PHPBB plugin and a Vanilla forum plugin and so much more

Problems: Fuck ups
It has to be open so it’s easy to fuck up. It are the people that don’t speak nine languages that download those packages, so after a while there should be some “official” release by people who are to “trusted”

Questions
Q: Why is this different than a wiktionary
A: It isnt really, its just more focused on sites and not on everything, and for every “item” there can only be one translation, not many.

Q: Are you really the first to come up with this?
A: Don’t know, couldn’t find any other initiatives, it would be cool if it’s already been solved though.

Q: What will happen to the words specific to my site that are not on the translation site?
A: The original English (or native) text of your site will fill up that gap. My believe is that a half translated site is still better than not a translation at all

Comments and questions are all welcome in the comments section

I hardly use Photoshop for photos though, it’s all webdesign. So if you are planning to do a lot with photos you might want to look at an other list of shortcuts. Here I focus mainly on the keys I use for webdesign. So lets assume you want to make prototypes and wire-frames of websites with Photoshop, In order to plan ahead, and make clients happy without actually having to code.

Trough the years I learned some shortcuts to handle Photoshop much quicker, many you probably already know, but some might come in hand.

first the single keys (just push the key to select the function)

V move tool, first push V, than keep the cntrl pushed down, and than click with the left mouse button on any object to select it, and move it around. Knowing this shortcut increased my Photoshop speed by 40% I think, you never need to look things up in the layer-pallet anymore.
A (arrow) Comes in hand to change vector objects, make sure it’s the white colored angle, so you can change vector objects)
M (marquee) make a selection
W (wizard) make a selection based on the colors
F push f and you switch to another view of Photoshop (push F four times and you are back where you begun)
Tab hides the pallets (push 3 times F and one time tab, and you have an empty screen)
T selects the text edit function, push T, click on a text field and you can edit it. Push cntrl+T to get yourself out of the text field again.
B brush (click anywhere in the document with the right mouse button to change the properties)
I eyedropper-tool - to select a color.
G fill bucket - most used by me in the combination of I (select a color) V + left click, G + left click, to fill a layer with the color of an other one.
Z - zoom use it in combination with ctrl + = or ctrl + - to zoom in and out quickly
Spacebar - keep the spacebar pushed down, click left, and move your mouse to move to the document.

Those where the key’s I used more often, you can check the whole alphabet if you want to know the secret behind every key. Now lets move on the the shortcuts

Shortcuts

shift + cntrl + alt + s save for the web, my most used combination saves your file for the web
alt + I + I changes image size
cntrl + A select all
cntrl + shift + C copy all layers
cntrl + V past image in new layer
cntrl + D deselects the selection again
cntrl + N and cntrl + v gives you an image in a new document
cntrl + R gives you rulers around the document (in properties you can set the distance in pixels instead of inch)
cntr + ; show the line guides, you can create and move them by pushing V and start dragging from the ruler to the document
in the view menu you can change if objects should snap to rulers
cntrl + T transform the object; standard on making it smaller or bigger, but if you click right on the object, you’ll get more options to change the object. Use cntrl+ Enter to do the transformation, or esc to escape it again.
cntrl + E merges to current layer with the one bellow
shift + cntrl + J cut out the current selection and put it into a new layer

This is about it, if you know more handy photoshop tricks, please fill me in on the comments. Thanks!

Some months ago I got an idea for a blog only about t-shirs. I took me some months to work it out (and weeks to find a .com name). But now it’s online and I’ve filling it with shirts for the last couple of weeks. Now I think there is the right amount of posts to test it a little. Go check it out: shirtlog.com - tee site for t-shirts

So what do you think, every comment about every tiny little detail is welcome

(And yes you can help me, save it to del.icio.us, add it to your favourites on technorati, write a blogpost about it, or a small post on hyves, everything to get the word out, thanks in advance)

In the morning session of the Next Web there where two more interesting presentations from the venture capitalists Jeff Clavier and Saul Klein. Their presentation gained a lot of sceptical criticism, nevertheless they got me thinking. So first a summary of their talks, and than I’ll look a bit deeper in the discussion they created.

Saul Klein is missing the right mindset
Saul Klein asks the audience “Why is an area, hardly half the size of the Netherlands, the most successful tech-innovation area in the world”. What Silicon Valley has is a tight connection between VC’s, start-ups and universities, and the ecosystem to commercialize what’s next on on the web.

Europe does have the right ingredients for the formula. It’s level of education is higher than in the States. There is a lot of old and new money, and people are working on technology everywhere. The thing missing according to Saul is the right mindset to make it work. As someone from the audience said “Europeans are educated to be employers instead of entrepreneurs” And from personal experience, i can’t do anything but agree with him.

Leafar wrote an excellent post about Saul’s presentation

Jeff Claviers shares many of the thoughts of his colleague, but first gives us a broader insight on what he thinks is going on in the current world. A vision of people “The previous web was about math, the next one is about people” And although I think he is right about the people, I do have some doubts that the previous one was about math. Yes Google has huge render machines, but what they do is looking for patterns into what humans do. I think the math won’t disappear in the next web, it will probably go bellow the surface where it always was.

Another point he made in which I think he is more right is that thanks to broadband the difference between the representation of the self online and in the real world is shrinking, mixing up, matching and becoming one big bricollage. “The distance between the us and the online us is shrinking” thank to the up going speed from broadband. If Jeff didn’t do it already I would advise him to read two classics The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - Erving Goffman and the Life on the Screen - Sherry Turkle. Besides his more social vision of the next web he also has some VC wisdom to share with us.

Tips and tricks to make technology innovation work in Europe:

• Success creates self-fulfilling prophecies. If one company has success, it can fund and help many other companies afterwards.
• Europe needs an VC equivalent of Kleiner Perkins a VC that invested in more than 300 (!) tech-startups
• Europeans should focus so much on their local market, and from the start build applications that are build for world domination (ehm scalable)
• Stop building local clones, go for the throat, forget the knock off’s
• Culture shift. Success should be celebrated, failure accepted and risk taking promoted.
• More sharing, networking and supporting.

I would add to that, more open coffee’s, more Next Web, and hey: We need an European Techcrunch!! But still one of the European problems is the big differences between languages and cultures.

The good things already in Europe

• Broadband access, faster and cheaper than whole of the us (Thank you KPN-Quest, you haven’t died for noting)
• Cellphones and mobile are here much better than in the US (Thank you Nokia and Eriksson) (We just leave Japan out of the picture here)

Herbert Blankenstein as an radio interview with Jeff online

Lessons to be learned

• Take risk, Start up, It’s ok to fail
• The Next Web are the people, contact is king (so go out and talk to people)
• Think big, dont clone, forget the country and go for the world

Interesting is the reaction on some weblogs

According to Read/Write web it’s just the same old talk over and over again, Life of a Coder declares Jeff the first Frenchmen to like. Gary Reid thinks that Saul and Jeff should put their money where there mouth is, and actually invest in some risk taking European start-ups.

So I’m left with the question, are we really that bad in Europe, is there a need for change, and if so, what should we do?

Last Friday I attended to the Next Web, (although i was very luck to been able to speak with some people on the night before) Because a lot of websites already did great coverages of the day, ill stick to the things i learned.

So what is the next web?

The next web is wireless (not mobile)
Although a lot of people and businesses are really betting on the mobile platform, I think a mobile phone is just some kind of small laptop computer, and that is only a matter of time before we will use it that way (or it’s already been used if you count all the blackberries at the next web). Off course there are different demands when you are wireless, location based services will really grow the upcoming years. But things like sms, mms, and paying extra for calling for long distances will (hopefully) soon be gone.

The Next Web isn’t a web
The web still refers to something static as the spider web. There is probably a need for a new metaphor. Something that is everywhere, always chancing, and always on. It’s a life and it’s about us and the world around us. (Thanks to Tapan Bath’s slide.)

The Next Web is about being connected.
Deborah Schultz already mentioned it, she has about 3000 connections, not all friends, not all a people on one platform like myspace or linked in, but just connections. I think although in lesser extent for me it’s the same. I have many connections, friends from the early days, classmates, ex-colleagues, people i’ve met, people I’ve never met etcetera. The more important a connection is, the more places I use to connect with them. We are probably becoming like star treks the Borg, but without a leader.

The Next Web is de-central
Although the web is in it being de-central, there will be more nodes and the size these nodes will be (relatively) smaller. It is really about the connection, the days of the portals are gone. It’s a headless organisation (like the starfish). The fact that the web is the biggest human invention that has never been out of order since it was build is a big proof of concept. Of course there will be small central places, smaller and bigger spiders will arise, but it wont be big companies any more, it will be people. Who those spiders are? They are the people you first visit and connect when a new social network arises.

The Next Web is about love
This Kevin Kelly quote from last years Next Web is still true I think, thanks to the transparency of the current web (and world) those who are only in it for the money will be discovered very quick and die a silent dead. Those who are however passionate about their work and their life, and are willing to share as much as possible will be the new big spiders of the future.

The Next Web is a social prison
Thanks to it’s structure the web will work as a modern version of the panopticon. With the difference that there is now a two way structure. Everyone will be able to see everyone else, but no-one will be sure if they are being watched. Misbehaviour will be punished, and only a honest reaction will save your ass.

The Next Web will be transparent
As mentioned above, thanks to to speed of information, the multi-connections and the possibility to read and write everywhere. it’s impossible to keep secrets on the web. If you suck, everyone will know it, if you rock everyone will know it too.

As a whole I liked the 2007 edition of the Next Web, I still think it’s one of the best Dutch events we have (together with Picnic) it gave me the opportunity to meet many old friends, to connect with new people and to learn and discuss about the current state of the web. And even been shocked that people knew who I was without ever meeting them before. A big Yay Hooray to Boris, Patrick and Arjen for making this thing happen.

For the next Next Web I would love to see some good science fiction writer or movie maker. Bruce Sterling or William Gibson would be high on my list of recommendations.

Check out some other reviews on BlueAce, MarketingFacts, Mashable, Upstream, Frankwatching, Marketing-podcast and DutchCowboys as well as the photos on Flickr, the videos on YouTube and of course the posts on the web itself.

update: photos on flickr

For those who used to love the good old Bob Ross painting classes. I remember I did, coming home from a heavy night in Amsterdam, turning on AT5, and watch some easy going, laid back painting actions. Well for those people who miss Bob, there is a digital replacement. It is called PixelPerfect it is hosted by Bert Monroy and even better you can subscribe to it by rss!