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Friday, March 31, 2006

Revver

Our love of video related ideas around this site is well known. One thing that got me thinking was that a lot of the people providing the content were getting very little in return. There must be millions of personal videos posted up and spread around the web for thousands to enjoy, with nothing but net infamy for the stars of the video as the reward for posting them.

The creators of our next contender, Revver, have set to redress this balance and have come up with their own unique take on the bigger sites like YouTube and Google Video. Basically, you can buy advertising on the back of videos, a portion of which goes to the person who submitted the video. A nice implemntation of a simple idea, and suddenly the big boys of the video world look really greedy in their snarfing of 'free' video content, The great thing is, the more popular your clip, the more potential there is to make money from it.

Thursday, March 30, 2006

ClipClip

Offline, people are great at keeping scrapbooks full everything from knitting patterns to family photos. But until now, if you've ever wanted to keep your own internet style scrapbook its been tricky. It has been possible by grabbing screen shots, copying text and code, but these methods have always been far from elegant.

ClipClip is like a big internet scrapbook with added Web 2.0 social aspects. Sign up, add a bookmarklet to your browser, and grab a copy of the section of the page you want to keep. You can catergorize your clippings by activity, such as recipes, technical tips, girls I fancy, etc. And of course, because it community driven you can tag your clips, search for 'em and share them with your friends. It's very new and in development, and seems to be a bit of a spam magnet at present, but none the less a promising and useful way of keeping interesting bits of web content.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Riya

Photosharing and organisation is nothing new, the growth of sites and services like flickr and Picasa attest to the strength of the area. Similar service are also making their impact, but to stand above the established players in the field, any new service will need a strong and unique selling point.

Riya is one such service, with the potential to grab a piece of the market with a very unique selling point - it can find pictures using face recognition. Like most software of this kind, it needs some training first, telling it who people are in your photostream. It then learns and you can tweak it to remove false positives and errors. This will be a great feature if your a social snapper (as many are) and have hundreds of pictures of friends and family all over the place. Its in beta at present - so help them test the software out and give it a go.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Make Me Watch TV

We have our first return nomination here at The Next Big Web Thing. Last month our readers liked Aric McKeown's Stuff And Me so much they voted it into second place in the monthly vote. This month he returns with another cool and quirky advertising opportunity for site promoters with a sadistic bent. I've selected this one for its desire to try and turn nothing into a unique advertising opportunity in the spirit of Fill My Room or Forehead Goldie.

At Make Me Watch TV Aric is striving to get paid for doing something he enjoys. For a small fee you can make Aric watch a TV programme of your choosing. He gives you an impression of the sort of shows he likes and dislikes, so if you choose, you can make him watch stuff he'll hate. In return he writes a review of the show, and puts a link to your site to show you sponsored the watching. I suspect he'll struggle to get as much attention, but hell, I liked the idea and plan on making him watch an episode or two of the Teletubbies next time I feel particularly mean spirited.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Google Idol

Over past posts we've seen some great new uses for online video sites such as You Tube and Google Video. Their embeddable players have led to an explosion of new sites and ideas. The way is wide open for plenty more innovative uses of these services, and today we look at one that has taken a simple, effective and entertaining TV format and turned it into a video driven polling site where people perform for your votes.

Google Idol takes the idea of such popular TV talent shows as Pop Idol and the X Factor, and opens them up to a web audience who are invited to submit their entries to the competition. The result is a fun and entertaining site which manages to have an acre more charm and warmth than the plastic wannabies you see on the TV counterparts. In fact, it makes me want to get my web cam and mime something right now.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Usability Exchange

I was reminded the other day that around 80% of websites in the UK fail to meet basic accessibility requirements for disabled people. I took it on myself to brush up on the subject, as I was being asked advice on how to improve accessibility on a client's website. New UK guidelines are planned as guidance to webmasters, but many whilst many may take heed and implement the guidelines to improve their sites, they will miss out on the ultimate test - end user testing.

Usability Exchange could help to change all that. Its a simple idea they've launched, but a useful one that concerned webmasters can take advantage of. Basically, they facilitate user testing by web users with various disabilities. Setting up this sort of testing would be beyond most webmasters, but now with this service it makes it a lot easier, and hence earns its place here.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Isolatr

Unusually, the site we're featuring here offers little more than a tiny quantity of content and no functionality. Its been popping up on various blogs and sites over the last week and if you haven't seen it already then you no doubt soon will. I'm not sure who pioneered the dropped 'e', but I suspect it was flickr.com. No doubt this web spawned affectation will cross over into the real world before long, like the vertical bar '|' and the underscore '_' and the dreaded at '@', all of which crop up with an annoying frequency in hip marketing campaigns and designs. Back in the web world, many people are using the dropped 'e' for their own entertainment and mischief.

Isolatr is one such upstart. The small but amusing parody is at the front of the Web 2.0 backlash, poking fun at both community driven sites, web vernacular and the dropped 'e'. I like that, it made me smile, it's cropping up everywhere, what more reason do I need to nominate it? None.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

KeepVid

This year seems to be the year of the online video site. They've always had a presence, but with the recently improved ability to post video direct to your site it seems to be taking off everywhere. Blogs, forums and specialist video sites are all starting to take advantage of video content offered by bigger outfits to enhance their offerings, and its set to get more prevalent as time goes on and bandwidth availability increases.

KeepVid is a handy site for online video fans which turns streaming media into downloads you can store on your hard drive. This is either very useful or a frustrating development for big companies that would choose to make content available but unsaveable via streaming only methods - depending on your point of view. Questions of ethics aside, this is one of those sites that will no doubt prove a catalyst in coming months with issues of copyright and distribution of media, with the frontier spirit the internet at times lacks in these corporate times.

Congratulations To The First Ever Winner

The vote's closed, the countings done, and by a narrow margin, we're proud to announce in first place this month is the excellent video take on Digg, Videosift.com. A unique and coverted badge is on its way to you in the post, to display if you choose.

In a close second was the quirky advertising venture, Stuff And Me followed by the increasingly lovely Ninja And Zombie. We'll continue to bring you our pick of new and interesting sites and technologies and come back at the end of March for this month's vote.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Google Mars

Google seem to have something up their sleeve all the time, and once more they've managed to supply people with something surprising. However, unusually for Google, that thing in the main will be useless to all but the most intrepid explorers out there.

Google Mars utilizes the simple Google Maps interface to give you a pictorial map of, well, the planet Mars. Ok, so this isn't going to make finding a hotel any easier or give you an idea how to get from the Mars icecap to the Mariner Canyon. However, after the initial buzz it will generate as people look for the various faces and canals on the red planet, it leaves one with a tantalising glimpse of the future. It may be a distant future, but who knows' maybe the next trick up their sleeves is Google Voyager, Interplanetary Holidays! For that tantalising glimpse they earn their nomination.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Site Shuffle

Organising links can be a chore, building folders, optomising the space on your link tool bar, remembering where you left bookmarks, etc. The modern web offers many easy and fun ways of organising your links. Many of these ways offer even more functionality around link organisation - the ability to share them with others, the ability to pick up suggested links, etc.

Site Shuffle is the latest in a line of useful link related sites. Its very new and still in beta at the moment, and as such has a few issues to do with logins. Its simply a fun way to navigate your favourite links, and also its good for suggesting links to you by recommendations based on the links you've already choosen. Set it as your homepage, add a few of your most frequent links, pick some of the one suggested to you then navigate them with the funky and eye catching interface. Big left and right buttons spin your link selection before your eyes, and nothing can be more satisfying than launching a favourite site by pressing the big red launch button.

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Roundtuit

I kid you not, when I bought this domain and considered the site I wanted to put here, one of the ideas was for a subdomain which would be called ideas4.thenextbigwebthing.com - the premise being people would dump ideas that they had but didn't want to do anything with. I'm a real believer in creative brainstorming and ideas development, and subscribe to the school of thought that's it better to let your ideas out into the wild and grow rather than see them stifled by your own lack of usage or imagination.

The community blog Roundtuit takes a similar idea and asks people to submit their unwanted ideas to them. In true Web 2.0 style it also tries to connect these basic ideas with people who can make them possible, and to follow up any that have been turned into actual things - all in the spirit of sharing. And that's a good thing and why it earns a place here.

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