Following everything must be great. The all-seeing eye, yeah! Never miss anything worthwhile. Be the first to know. I’m signing for it.

Such a beautiful utopia, but oh so dangerous to strive for. Though there are plenty of tools that will help you getting you there. Turn on a sound effect every time you receive an email or tweet. Wear your head set all the time. And…, install an Adobe Air app which keeps you up to date about all the latest articles in your feed selection.

Snackr is such a service. After installing it on the Adobe Air platform, importing your OPML file, and placing it in the preferred corner – your RSS feeds are always available. Right there, in the corner of your eye.

I’m running the RSS reader while I’m typing this post, and man, it drives me crazy! It keeps asking for my attention. Like a TV screen in a bar. The design, features, and usability: it’s all very well-executed. – but using the nifty little program will mean the end of productivity for me.

But hey, maybe you’re the kind of guy/ gal who needs a little bit of distraction. If that’s the case, don’t hesitate and click here.

I’m not a morning person. The moment my iPhone’s terrible “alarm” rings, I curse the day. There’s only one reason why I make it to the office, or anywhere besides my bed. Music.

It fuels my life. And those of my friends. We exchange music every day – our drop boxes are working overtime. The Hypemachine, a secret new music service, and some specific friends on Twitter supply us with inspiration for new songs and albums. There’s only one downside.., my iTunes collection is a mess.

In comes TuneUp

Actually, my iTunes collection was a mess. Ever since I’ve discovered TuneUp, I can browse my collection Cover Flow style without being agitated by the lack of covers.

TuneUp is a management tool that let’s you clean dirty tracks (like the ones that have the artists’s name in the song title), find missing cover art, receive upcoming concert alerts, and enjoy music videos.

The PC version is available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, so most of your European folks can use the service in your native language. People from Holland, Scandinavia, and Eastern European countries must remain patient for a while.

Still in beta, we have 50 invites

TuneUp for Mac is still in private beta, meaning it made my Mac crash once and it loads very slowly. But still, my collection looks way better now. So grab yourself one of those Next Web invites to try it our yourself. Send an email to thenextweb@tuneupmedia.com, the first 50 will be invited to the TuneUp Mac Beta.

The normal program is free for 500 songs/50 album art cleans, and $19.95 for unlimited (Gold version).

Organizing a competition on your blog is always mentioned as a good way to get your visitors love you more. When Problogger’s Darren Rowse writes a post about creating an active community, competitions won’t go unmentioned. But to organize one is a pain. You’ll have to make up all the procedures and logistics yourself. Not the kind of thing a busy blogger is waiting for. That didn’t go unnoticed by Crystalroot’s Savraj, Kalid, and Lee, who founded the service ContestMachine.

This Y Combinator backed start-up let’s you create a competition widget which you can easily place on your site. There’s your competition! You can specify the prize (of course), what users have to do (answer a question, poll, or just enter their name), customize the design, the deadline, and collect some user data for email news letters. Oh and do you want a random winner or pick the lucky one yourself? The service is free to try out when you organize two contests a month, and then charges $9 a month for ten contests or $90 a year for fifty contests.

It’s funny to see how a widget can make such a complicated thing as a competition really easy. I seriously expect this service to stir up the number of competitions on blogs. The little thing just arouses a feeling of “I have to organize a competition right now!”.

If you’re not a web publisher, you might wonder by this point what’s in it for you? Well, as I said before, you might see more competitions on your blog. But that’s just a wild guess. What’s more concrete, is ContestMachine’s live page. You can check all the running competitions in their network. So if you’re bored for a minute, start winning some prizes!

By the way, we’ll organize another competition this week with Adobe. Stay tuned to see the ContestMachine widget popping up.

iHologram – iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

I’ve showed this video to a couple of friends in Berlin (where I’m staying for a few days), and they all freaked out. Maybe because I left the “illusion” part out of it, I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, it’s a really cool effect. David OReilly is responsible for this hologram. He used “the Cat” from his award-winning but unfinished cartoon PSS and gave it a 3D effect with Anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (the one with the skull).

I wonder when the holograms become reality, Starwars style. On the iPhone it would probably look a bit like this:

[Via iSmashPhone]

Yahoo is a pioneer of the Web 2.0 giants. In an industry where blogs, organizations, press, and companies just talk about the possibilities and the urge of opening up – Yahoo is the only major Internet company that really experiments with these new standards. Whereas dozens of companies take small symbolical steps, Yahoo just talks in terms of leaps. After embracing OpenID, the Sunnyvale-based company now opens up its search platform to third parties with the launch of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).

How to get back at Google

Although they state their goal is to “foster innovation in the search landscape“, we all know it’s a daring strategy to win back some terrain on Google. The big G has over 68 percent of the search market and is often called THE leader in search. Somehow, they keep on strengthening this position and it seems like they’ll never give this no. 1 position away. The Yahoo executives have realized this, and now take a different road to search success. I can’t say it better than Marshall Kirckpatrick from ReadWriteWeb, who stated that Yahoo “attacks Google with an army of verticals” – referring to the vertical search engines who will use the index of Yahoo to offer specified results for niches.

The revenge of the alts

These vertical engines now suffer from a lack of indexed sites – as it’s nearly impossible to create an index of the relevant parts of whole web. Yahoo has accomplished this, and now makes it possible for these alternative search engines to focus on the product, not the technology. As Yahoo will offer the folllowing features:

Ability to re-rank and blend results – BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
Total flexibility on presentation – Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

With this, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees the prediction he told me in January becoming reality: “Good quality search is becoming a commodity item. The search quality of Google, Yahoo and Ask are actually very similar. So the idea that Google is some kind of technological powerhouse, is actually not longer true.”

See some examples of BOSS at Hakia and Me.dium.

Although everybody seems to be raving about video on Flickr, I just like to bring something totally different – yet photo-related – subject under your attention. It’s a really interesting photo project by Jonathan Harris called The Whale Hunt. For some of you, this might be old news as it’s published six months ago, but I don’t want to risk that other people miss this incredible photo series. Moreover, I think that some media art doesn’t hurt this blog. After all, our main purpose is to inspire you.

Eleven months ago, Harris traveled to the Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, to see how they hunt on whales. Before you ask, his project is not a political statement whatsoever, he just wanted to cover a ritual that has been going on for ages.

His photos series of the whale hunt is quite special, since it’s a new way of human storytelling:

The photographs are presented in a framework that tells the moment-to-moment story of the whale hunt. The full sequence of images is represented as a medical heartbeat graph along the bottom edge of the screen, its magnitude at each point indicating the photographic frequency (and thus the level of excitement) at that moment in time. A series of filters can be used to restrict this heartbeat timeline, isolating the many sub stories occurring within the larger narrative (the story of blood, the story of the captain, the story of the arctic ocean, etc.).

He collected the photos by making one pic every five minutes, even when he was asleep. The result looks something like this:

I think Harris discovered a new interesting way of telling a story. Imagine how this would look like when you cover a soccer match. You can tell by the heartbeat when the match turns interesting. Or a political debate. I hope to see some examples of that. Or do you know one already?

Every week we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views. Well, actually six questions, since we also ask the start-up to who he or she is passing the mic to.

As I’ve promised you last week, I will interview the start-ups who participated in the start-up rally of PLUGG 2008. This time we’re interviewing Bertrand Bodson, co-Founder Bragster.com. He already got some coverage on this blog for some serious pie throwing. Yet he and his team can do more than getting attention in an unconventional way, since they run a rather popular start-up. It’s a service on which friends can dare each other to something incredibly stupid. How did they come up with that?

How did you come up with the idea of Bragster?

“It all started as a “coffee-machine” type of idea. Wim, while at Morgan Stanley, was going to the hairdresser before an important meeting. Some of his colleagues dared him to go bold. They would supposedly pay him £500 if he did it. They kind of agreed, but eventually it never really happened knowing that he wouldn’t probably get the reward. That was enough to get us thinking – I was still at Amazon.com at the time. The net was the ideal platform to make it official and record those dares, with no way back and even getting your friends to chip in by betting if you would do it or chicken out, adding the necessary and fun social pressure to it. Over time, lot of things have evolved of course, e.g.: we added a strong community dimension to it, a virtual currency, the ability to easily upload video evidence and so on. But one thing remained the same: we are simply bringing to the net what has been a natural human behaviour for centuries: there is a competitive spirit in all of us, and bragging with friends is part of the human nature… and fun.” (more…)

Checkser is a service that allows people to create public checklists, whatever the subject. Founder Marijn Deurloo came up with the idea during his brainstorm with his mentor, only a few weeks ago, and started to develop it right-a-way. The result is a very simple and clean-looking site.

You can look up checklists by browsing through the tags, user history pages or using the search engine. Some useful checklists I have found: a fishing trip list, Bottle soccer, Financial Management and a Web standards checklist.

KillerStartups reviewed the service as well, and they were pretty enthusiastic about it. Yet they did miss something: ‘Some more web 2.0 features would also be nice, such as user profiles’. I’ve emailed Deurloo to find out if he will add features like that. He replied: “Checkser is currently linked to the openID-initiative for linking to profiles, so authors can make themselves known by entering their openID-id. A link to their openID profile is then added to the “history”-page of a checklist. In the future, more social features like ratings will be added.”

I hope he will, since the anonymous approach might actually threaten the quality of the content. Especially since the checklists have a ‘read more’ link that the creator of the list can use to link to his own page. Deurloo deliberately added that function so that checklists can be used as teasers for companies. Yet it could be too tempting for gambling sites and other infamous low quality content sites to use it as an extra ad space.

So I’ve asked Deurloo how he will make sure that the quality of the checklist will remain good. Deurloo: “I’m hoping that the same mechanism that works well for Wikipedia will also work for checklists. Users help keeping the quality up, by being able to revert to previous versions of checklists and branching off those.” The self-control approach doesn’t really work yet, since the tag ‘test‘ contains 34 test checklists. More traffic and users might end this problem.

Unlike Wikipedia, Checkser does have a business model. It’s not much yet, Deurloo uses the Amazon affiliate program. “By suggesting relevant books to the checklists, I hope a little money can be made.” Makes sense, since he attracts a Getting Things Done crowd, and they’re generally eager to buy books.

But Deurloo has more good plans for the future: “As several businesses have already asked me, I will be creating a “pro”-version with company-private checklists for use on intranets for a small subscription fee. Kind of like the Basecamp and Backpack websites do.” So Deurloo can soon mark the ‘create pro version’ point on the ‘How to run a successful Internet service’.

A great way to spend this lazy Sunday afternoon is looking up Yamelo and be ready for a music trip down memory lane. This site has collected almost every hit from the sixties and beyond. Just click on a year or search for an artist. Remember your first kiss, school party, rock concert or that first vacation without your parents? All the songs you listened back then, are there.

Yamelo presents the songs as videos, ripped from YouTube. That basically makes it a music video search engine annex directory, with a great interface. Try to look up a song on this page and then compare it with Yamelo, you’ll know what I mean.

I hope the makers of Yamelo will put even more effort in developing the site, and filter out the videos of bad quality. Also, the service lets you relive your greatest memories but wouldn’t it be great if you could also share them? Yamelo would become a beautiful archive of not just music, but also the funny, touching, great and sad stories connected to the melodies.