soulcreation

Tweetbacks (beta), a super service created by Dan Zarrella. It works in a similar way as trackbacks on your blog. The only difference is that it does not show trackbacks from other blogs but from Twitter. In other words a great way to follow conversations about your posts on Twitter.

Thumbs up for Dan.

Last week I and many others attended Future of Web Apps in London. A fantastic event. I learned many things, heard even more new things but there was more much more. Kevin Rose is great, Marc Zuckerberg is a real phenomenon in real life, Angels really can give a massage.

I’ll try to give a synopsis as how I enjoyed the event.

It all started on Thursday morning, flying in to London City, dropping of the bagage at the hotel and take a bus towards the venue. We were being warmly welcomed by people from ‘I love MySurch’, another event that took place at the same venue. They knew how to turn a smile on every one’s face.

After this it was straight towards the registration desk and heading towards Kevin Rose (Digg) speaking bout ‘The Future of News’. Perhaps it was too early for Kevin but I really could not understand what he’s up to with Digg. They’ll launch some new features soon related to personal recommended news. How it’s going to work it’s not clear to me but I fear this will lead to premier news providers that will massively start to produce news in certain content areas. This might influence certain areas of personified news interests aka ‘brainwashing’. Certain people working in marketing might abuse this system. This of course is just an assumption.
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Matthew Inman did a pretty neat job by illustration the State of the Web anno summer 2008. Reminds me of the Epic 2015 story made for the Museum of Media History.

Here is the 2007 version of the State of the Web.

(thanks to MurtenSaerbi en Sara)

TypeRacer is a fun tool for everyone that wants to learn to type or likes a little bit of competition. You can practice, or race type complete strangers or your friends after you sent them an invite. A fun touch is the list of scores. You’ll be on top of the list when you do good. But scores are updates frequently so in order to stay on top you’ll need to practice a lot. Go TypeRace.

A while ago I wrote about Songza, your online jukebox. Here’s Zetrax, a Songza lookalike if you ask me. ZeTrax has a clean look and feel, search functionality and a playlist. Simple, nothing more, nothing less and it works fine.

Last night and still a part of this morning we did some fun things at work.

Belgian youth radio Studio Brussel has turned 25 years and the entire week they are celebration doing fun things as well. People can participate and create things. But one thing caught our attention at the office and that is that they are giving away a holiday to Tanzania for 25 people. The most blasting concept will win. I have no idea how the jury will pick the winner but I fore sure like to go to Tanzania. So we thought of a concept that might be considered a winner.

Our concept is based on a Douwe Egberts coffee commercial in which a character speaks dyslectic until he gets his first coffee in the morning. These commercials are in Dutch and French but basically it translates the word koffie (sounds like ‘coffee’) into fokkie (sounds like ‘focky’). The commercials are a huge hit and are made by Duval Guillaume.

Our concept we’ve build for the 25th anniversary of the radio station is, as said, based on the Douwe Egberts commercial and creates a dyslectic name once you enter your name. It’s quite funny, if I may say so myself.

Try it at www.verbrudiostusselaar.be. (for the non-Dutch speakers, just enter your name in the middle of the screen and push the red button)

Have your unsalted meaning about specific topics. Or create a topic for yourself and see what others think about your opinion at Soapboxxer. I sure like this fun tool.

In the on line environment people still do prefer to read off line. A newspaper or magazine reads better while sitting in your sofa, I agree. And so did Jonas Martinsson. He created Feed Journal, a tool to create your own newspaper from your own or someone else’s RSS feed. There is a free option that generates 20 pages of content or a paid service that generates a journal form ‘unlimited’ RSS feeds, depending on the membership you sign up for.

One thing I miss is the links on the read more items in the pdf file that gets generated. Don’t get me wrong. While off line reading it’s of course not possible (yet) to click on links.

Read my journal.

Yesterday I attended the Plugg conference in Brussels. A conference with the main focus on raising global awareness for European start-ups in the Web / Mobile 2.0 field. A first time ever event of this kind in Belgium. I wish to thank Robin Wauters for his great organizational skills and pulling this thing together.

I arrived late due to traffic in and around Brussels. I should have left home earlier. So I missed the first presentation but according to Miel (coolz0r) I didn’t miss much.

The second presentation though was quite interesting. Max Niederhorfer spoke about the Future of Online Games. Here are some things I remember which I found very interesting:

• The most popular game at this very moment is ‘poke’ on Facebook. Surprised? I am not. Just a click to get someone’s attention and to get a sheep thrown back at you.
• Also very surprisingly was that 57% of the people that play online are women (did I get that well?). Desperate housewives? I heard about these figures before.
• People who play online actually rather play with friends than strangers. Even it’s for 5 minutes.
• Silverlight goes 3D. If someone has more info on this, please send some.

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Great work from Information Architects Japan. They pinned down almost 300 of the most influential and successful websites/services to the greater Tokyo-area train map, to create the 2008 Web Trend Map.

This looks awesome and must have been a lot of work with a lot of patience. Nice work!