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This is funny, smart and remarkable.
This guy is working for a non-for profit organization and doesn’t have enough money to attend The Next Web Conference, but he sure wants to go to it! So he made this website, check it out

Next week (3 to 10 May) Boris, Arjen and I will visit San Francisco for a week. We’re going to meet up with some friends, make some video content for The Next Web Conference and pitching and showing Fleck.
Next to pitching and filming we have to work as well (life goes on). Our trip to London Open Coffee Meetup gave us an idea. After the Open Coffee meetup we had an appointment at Index Ventures’ office. Once that was done we were allowed to stay all day and use their office and wifi to work.

So, for our trip to San Francisco we’re looking for startups who have office space for us (a table, 3 chairs and a wifi connection will do) for one day. This is a nice way to meet new people and work at the same time. We will blog about the office on the Fleck blog, bomega, and here.

So, who’s up for Open Office? I’ve checked some potential startup offices that are in the neighborhood were we like to crash… uuh work.
Sixapart, Technorati, Furl, Rojo, Rollyo, Eurekster, Browster, Wists, Dogster, Twitter, Flickr, Upcoming, Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo

Today, the voting round for The Next Web Awards is live. We worked hard to get everything in place.

About two weeks ago Arjen and I had a discussion about elections and how people are stimulated to vote. The conclusion was (at least here in the Netherlands) that there is almost no incentive to vote, your vote ends up in the huge pile of votes and is statistically meaningless. It’s even worse! Your vote has just as much voting power as any grandma’s vote, while you have been studying politics, dug into the political problems, did background research on all party members and spend 3 hours on a daily basis reading papers surfing the web to make a 100% sure that you suck in all the information which you think is needed to cast your (valuable) vote. The 90 year old grandma (not anyone in particular) gets up on voting day, goes to the voting booth and presses a button (she forgot her glasses so she was not 100% sure which button it was). Both votes have the same power. Conventional wisdom says that one person has one vote, every person is equal, that is the basics of Democracy, right?
But wouldn’t it make sense that the vote of the guy who knows everything about politics has more power than grandma’s vote? (how you would facilitate this is a different story, and for the brevity of this post I will not go into this).

So for The Next Web Awards we thought… let’s experiment!* Let’s try to find a way to give you an incentive to vote and to vote in multiple categories (not only the one where your buddy is nominated). We identified 3 ways that should have a positive influence on the incentive to vote:
1. Instant reward
2. Some votes have more power than others (You can empower your vote)
3. Reward the “top” voters

So what we did is give the voter the possibility to get rewarded instantly. If you vote in all 8 categories we will double your voting power (we reward you for the time invested). But then there are other ways to empower your vote, but this time the voter is depending on others (your network or blog readers). You can invite your friends, colleagues or business contacts to cast a vote as well. If they do that, then your vote gets more power. Same story with your blog readers, if you put the widget on your site, all votes collected via that widget empower your votes.

We build in a maximum voting power. Any vote can count up to 12 times in the election.
1 vote = 1 vote
Vote in all categories and we will count your votes 2 times
Invite friends and multiply your power again 2 times
Install the widget and your voting power will be multiplied with a factor 3.
1 x 2 x 2 x 3 = 12

To top it off we introduce the top 100 voters and put them on the front page with a link to their site/blog.

If you’d translate this into the real world, you might be on to something…. at least it would make sense to give some voters more power than others (if they have more knowledge, can stimulate others to cast their vote, etc.). But I see this post is already ridiculously long, so I won’t even go there.

I’m curious how this works out. Via http://twitter.com/NextWeb we will give updates.

* The great thing about the web is that you can just do that

a day later than we projected, the nominees of The Next Web Awards are announced. We worked hard to get the voting system in place and we will expand it somewhat during the next days (we will show the top referrers, the last referrers, introduce a widget, and make some changes to the interface)

You can follow the award election via twitter

This is a really long list, so if you want to skip this and go straight to the voting section, please do

There we go:
Category: Entertainment (Let me entertain you!)
DailyMotion, Second Life, Joost, Metacafe, World of Warcraft, LastFM, Youtube

(GIGA, glowria online DVD rental, glowria VOD, U.[lik], Next WebStar, SpotDJ and Podshow didn’t make the cut)

Category: Company (One company, to rule them all..)
Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo Apple, Google.

(wunderLOOP and Web templates didn’t make the cut)

Category: Social (You and me)
Plaxo, XING, meebo, Twitter, Cambrian House, Cyworld, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hyves, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, ebuddy, Dogster, LinkedIn

(Wink, Independant Index (IENS), Next WebStar, www.pocketinfo.nl, Criteo, CafeMom, SecondLifeCamp, Maya’s Mom didn’t make the cut)

Category: Disruptors (Give me your share, now!)
Pixenate, A Swarm of Angels, Sellaband, Zopa, Netvibes, Open ID, Zecco, Turn, Edgeio, Joost, 37signals

Category: Web Celeb (Who’s the (wo)man!)
Tom Anderson, Steve Jobs, Lonelygirl15, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Rose, Marc Andreessen, Michael Arrington, Tariq Krim

(Hjalmar Winbladh, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, Jan Joost Rueb and Jeff Bezos didn’t make the cut)

Category: Beta & Stealth (Rookie of the year)
Trayle, SpendView, Sxipper, Radar, LouderVoice, Hypesphere, Mailemotion, Tipit.to, Fleck, miniRSS, Powerset, Outback online , Swoot, Wakoopa, Joost, Intense Debate, Plum, PolarRose, Freebase, Twones, Spotplex, Diigo, wunderLOOP Connect

(TV 4 Business, floorplanner, Visitopia, Second Life Project didn’t make the cut)

Category: Populizr (Show me the visitors)
TechCrunch, Slashdot, Netscape, Meneame, MyBlogLog, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg

(Diigo didn’t make the cut)

All nominees are also in one del.icio.us account

Tomorrow we’ll notify all nominees and explain our ‘NOT all votes are the same’ principle…..

Next Monday (April 16) the The Next Web Award Nominees will be announced.
We will constantly give updates on how all nominees are doing and inside scoops (as of Tuesday) on http://twitter.com/NextWeb

We’re working very hard to get everything in place and to change the world of web awards for once and for all!

More, during the weekend or on Monday.

We like to welcome our new sponsor ZOOOF.com. ZOOOF is a family network where you can keep track of your family arrange family meetings, add profiles etc.
ZOOOF is still in Beta and are planning to release a new version during The Next Web Conference. the website is available in 35 languages (easy if you have family abroad : ) )

Check it out.

For The Next Web Awards people can leave their suggestions on who should be nominated for the voting round of the Awards. We have already a lot of very cool companies and services in there. Popular categories are: Entertainment, Beta and Stealth and Social.
This weekend the jury will decide which ones will join the contest.
But next to real good suggestions, some ‘drugstores’ selling the kind of pills you don’t hope to need, have discovered the Award entries as well. I appreciate the entries, but I don’t think that they will have any chance to win an award. Therefore I deleted the entries, hope you don’t mind

Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures and founding father of the OpenCoffee club will get us up to speed on European entrepreneurial spirit during The Next Web Conference.
Saul is a rising star in the Venture Capital scene. He is investor in Last.FM, Stardoll, Moo, Spotrunner and is Vice president eCommerce at Skype
Furthermore we will host the first International OpenCoffee meetup in Amsterdam the day after the conference. It will be held in De Jaren (around the corner of the conference venue) from 11:59 AM to 02:00 PM. If you like to join please visit the upcoming page. More info on how OpenCofee started can be found at Saul’s blog.

We’re happy to have you over Saul! Inspire us!

This is the last call for all early birds. Today all invited people can register with 125 EUR discount. As of tomorrow we will open up registration at normal rates (550 EUR). For normal rate registration no invitation is needed.

The Early bird discount is almost over (7 days) and then the registration will open up to the public.
Last year we had a lot of requests from non-for-profit organizations who would like to partner with us in one way or the other. Most of those organization have a couple of hundred members with deep interest in the web scene (tech entrepreneurs). We didn’t have a real program for them, but they were allowed to give their members a discount on the price.
This year we like to do something extra for industry organizations. Organizations can become a ‘friend’ of The Next Web. This means that they can give a 125 EUR discount to their members and will be featured on the website. We will create some space to put the industry organization logos on the front page.
Friends can decide their selves on how to notify their members, via email or on their organization website.
This way industry organizations can easily get a discount for their members and get exposure on our site.

If you’re a member of such an organization (or if you’re on the board) and you think your organization should team up with us please sent me contact information.