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Brainstorming fresh ideas with post-its on the white board. Can't wait to see them come to fruition...! 

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Hope everyone had a great weekend...only ONE day left til Christmas! Can't wait! :)

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Introducing the new Nine Connections!

It’s been a crazy few weeks here at Nine Connections HQ in Amsterdam to have everything ready before the end of this year. So here is our little big surprise for you. We’re extremely proud to have launched last week the new Nine Connections, a web application that is designed to help journalists and social media professionals discover sharable content fast, increase engagement and reach a greater audience. After trials with The Guardian, The Economist and Persgroep Netherlands, 1000 media companies can now participate in our crowdfunding-style project and take Nine Connection to the next level, becoming the Reuters for social networks. What’s new? Newsrooms are at the core of Nine Connections. They can look deep into your Twitter network and find interesting news beyond your first-degree connections. The Share Factor indicates which articles have been shared by followers and which are currently popular within your Twitter audience. This helps news media professionals to be faster and get a head start on the competition. Take a look at our beautiful web app, to get a sense of the nine connections experience! www.nineconnections.com

The Nine Connections story

Social media is on the forefront of reader’s choice for breaking news. But many of these news stories are left untold, and unless shared or re-tweeted will remain in a closed circle of friends. Nine Connections is changing that, bringing you not only breaking news but also those rare, off the beaten track news that will come to you - and thus your followers - as a delightful surprise.

Now we are ready to tell the media about our product. Reaching out to bloggers to blog and journalists to spread the word! 

Video: The Nine Connections Project 

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UXmas cocktail meeting at Info.nl

(Iris van de Kieft and Peter Boersma - Amsterdam UXmas Cocktail Hours at Info.nl)

Dear UX Enthusiasts,

It's no exaggeration to say that yesterday’s UXmas cocktail hours meetup was a great success. Big kudos to Peter Boersma, Organizer; Iskander Smit, Info.nl and Sponsor; Dominiek ter Heide, Bottlenose; and our beloved Iris Van de Kieft, Nine Connections for their excellent and interesting presentations.

The meetup started off with Iskander’s inspiring presentation of big data and emerging concept developments in the radical and relevant now. Next up, second speaker Dominiek, explained lessons learned from the Bottlenose product development. We couldn’t agree more with his advice to 'release often, launch when ready'. Last but not least Iris, who took us through the nine connections journey from the first launch last year up to the current product, along with the challenges faced and lessons learned. Main points: 'Don’t be afraid to change the product, find a way to get good access to testers and work with the resources you have'.

It was interesting to see two similar and competing companies present, and in the end the audience raised questions for both speakers.

Nine Connections and Bottlenose are amongst a few emerging apps that aim to solve the problem of information overload, by using semantic analysis or people based trend prediction. We feel that through semantics, readers will get topic related articles, which are relevant for them, but are so focused, to a certain topic that they will miss serendipity. On the other hand, with people-based prediction you are not limited to topics but get news that is about to trend amongst a group of people, which allows for more serendipity. Nevertheless, a combination of the two could also be a very interesting approach, combining the best of both worlds. 

Again, many thanks for the presenters and sponsors from yesterday's meeting.

Maria Georgiou

@gmar002

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Meet the nine faces: Iris

Face VIII: Iris Van de Kieft

That Nine Connections is well represented internationally comes as no surprise to anyone.

Although Iris has, with her 1.84 meters height, pale skin and blond hair, a typical Dutch appearance, her story has also an overseas influence.

Thanks to her childhood in the US  – ‘which has been priceless,’ as she says – Iris speaks American English fluently. She has been living in Holland (mostly) for the past twenty years, yet managed to find a boyfriend who also grew up in the same area as she did in the US. Their paths almost crossed back then, but in the end it took 20 years and many miles for them to meet. This love story couldn’t be just a coincidence, but it was meant to be!

Since brains have always fascinated Iris, she could have been a neuropsychologist, but fortunately fate pushed her into the Nine Connections way.

As a Product Manager Iris carries a big load: She worked day and night in the past few months in order to make news worth sharing for our website's launch. Besides that, she is authoritative, punctual and an accurate worker. Managing and multitasking are also words that suit her well. At days when our Office Manager is not in, Iris also takes over the role without any effort.

Actually Iris earns the Oscar for Nine Connections Business Woman of the year!

Next week coming up: Ciska Hagenaars 

By: Marjolein Horst

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Wandering in the Woods, Oer-Wout

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Meet the nine faces: Coen

Face VII: Coen Wesselman

‘The life and soul of the party’

As the first son of four brothers, Coen was born 27 years ago in one of Amsterdam’s suburbs. Although his father would love if he followed in his footsteps and take over the bakery, Coen decided to study Media, Information and Communication. Those skills wouldn’t be very useful in a bakery but fortunately they are for our start-up company. In order to express his support to a charity, he is growing a moustache for thirty days. With a few hairs on top, the hair growth in his face is considerably more. We are happy 1st of December is nearly there, because it means that we can see his bright, handsome face again.

In order to stay strong and healthy Coen cycles, runs and swims like mad. Together with his personal coach he trains for marathons and triathlons all over Europe.

Now, he is busy with friends, sports, girls, dentists, work, and drinking; Coen means all or nothing at all.

So when there’s a party around, make sure you invite Coen: he’ll be good company and the life and soul of the party!

  Next week coming up: Iris van de Kieft

By: Marjolein Horst

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NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Nov 15, 2012) - Tynt, the leader in sharing solutions for publishers and content creators, today disclosed research across thousands of web publishers. Among other top findings, the data revealed that copy & paste is the most prevalent method by which users share text, images, and URLs across the web. This common behavior stems from users highlighting text or images on a web page, copying it to their clipboard, and then pasting it into emails, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and more...

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Meet the nine faces: Kamran

Face VI: Kamran Massoudi

'The reliable one'

Kamran’s cradle was standing miles away, in former Persia to be precise.

He came to Amsterdam at the age of 22, finished his Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam and started to work at Nine Connections since the early beginnings. In the meantime he passed the test on the chapter ‘how to become a Dutch citizen’ very well: Kamran already cycles like a local, never starts his morning without an Old Amsterdam cheese sandwich and drinks beer like a beer master. The only thing that’s left in the list is to learn Dutch. But rumours say, it’s in his plans for 2013.

According to Kamran, the best invention ever would definitely be Skype. Without the free chat function, he would have an enormous telephone bill and would see his family hardly once a year.

As a born Computer Engineer, he is a real asset for Nine Connections. Apart from working on the new app release, he's also busy improving our backend system.

Kamran learns from, changes and enjoys the journey that is called ‘life’. Along the way, he wants to go on an adventure and fulfill his many dreams.

Next week coming up: Coen Wesselman

By Marjolein Horst

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Twitter is pivoting into algorithms - Hello mainstream media

Dalton Caldwell has written an interesting blog this week, called Twitter is pivoting. He believes that Twitter’s new ‘discover’ tab is the future, and has based that thought - amongst other clues – on Peter Chernin’s first ever tweet, joining Twitter’s board of directors. (Note: Dalton Caldwell is the founder of App.net, a Twitter alternative without advertising)

This tweet illustrates, as pointed out by Caldwell, that this new boss doesn’t use twitter to communicate or is unaware of Twitter’s messaging basics. He starts his tweet with ‘@twitter’- experienced twitter users know that only followers of the mentioned handle, and people who follow him, see tweets that start with @handle. Or was this tweet meant to be sort of private? And if so, why?

As it is stated on his tweet, Chernin uses Twitter just for news and information. In fact a lot of people do. Twitter has become a great tool to share and receive news fast. People can become news sources; they can be the eyes and ears of the street and the web and they can be part of the news development or help to spread important news. As long as they know how and are not passive Twitter users.

In the beginning, the Twitter model worked out great, until it faced exponential growth. Today it becomes more and more difficult to find important or unique news fast. They’re just to many tweets and like we’ve written before, hashtag hookers hijack trending topics with spam.

Twitter tries to stay a relevant news tool with algorithms to generate local trending topics, top tweets and the discover tool. This has a big commercial benefit: algorithmically filtered feeds are vastly easier to advertise than unfiltered feeds, Caldwell says. So, Chernin will pivot Twitter from a realtime tool into an algorithmical tool.

This commercial benefit also implies that more and more commercial tweets will be favoured over regular tweets. This of course will be at the expense of interesting tweets that are not paid for; we see this happening already on Facebook. But also tweets from famous people or mainstream media Twitter accounts, will be favoured in an algorithmically filtered feed. Facebook is already algorithmical and we don’t depend on it for fast, breaking news from all over the world. But on Twitter it will obscure our view of unique news gems and it will become another medium for the same old mainstream news. 

by Heleen van Lier

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Meet the nine faces - Face V: Heleen van Lier

100% Heleen

When God distributed curiosity, Heleen decided not to stand in the back row. Hence, her career as a journalist now comes as no surprise.  

Heleen has exactly two jobs; she works at the online department of a Dutch daily newspaper and helps Nine Connections to expand its network of journalists by communicating the right message.  

On Wednesdays everybody at the office is happy for her weekly visit. Her preference for short dresses and skirts means that the day she will appear in normal jeans is still yet to come.

Social media, communities, sharing news and articles are words Heleen breathes. After work, she likes to catch up with her boyfriend, who is also an Internet junkie.

Lowlands, Ibiza and Friesland are the places she takes time to chill out and is willing to leave everything behind for; even a house that’s in the middle of renovation.

Although her slim body wouldn’t tell, Heleen hates sports but likes food. Sushi, toasty’s and burgers are her favorite. She’s not gorging it like others do, but it takes her ages before she finishes her meal. Enjoying it in a relaxing and mindful way, that’s 100% Heleen!

Next week coming up: Kamran Massoudi

By: Marjolein Horst

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The social media examiner published an interesting article today, which I found through the nine connections app. It's about finding ideas for your blog. This is a great topic, because if you want your blog to stand out, it's important to regularly publish interesting and unique topics, add relevance, and be very fast. But that's not always easy to do.

The social media examiner gives seven tips, from 'search for specific topics in Bottlenose' and 'look at other blogs for ideas'. These are all reasonable ideas, but the writer of the article overlooks an important issue: serendipity. How can you encounter truly original topics and be fast, if you have to come up with the topics yourself, and then go look for articles around them? 

Therefore, I take the freedom to add another tip to the list.

#8: use the nine connections app to find original content fast.

Nine Connections makes your Twitter account work for you as your personal newsroom. Detecting interesting news faster than your audience, will allow you to be the first to blog and break the news. It helps you discover news gems that would otherwise slip under your radar; gems that could spark a blog post idea or two and cure that temporary state of blogger’s block.

Nine connections also provides data about an article’s social share-ability. That helps media professionals determine which news items are still worth sharing and interesting for their audience.

By the way, responding to a blog post like this - is also one of the suggestions the social media examiner made, so thank you for that ;)

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Meet the nine faces: Anton

Face IV: Anton Zeef

"The pillar of strength"

Although Anton has lived in Amsterdam for many years, his accent betrays his northern roots. In fact, he appreciates his hometown so much that he decided to move back there after the birth of his daughter. Despite of the recent fires, according to Anton, Winschoten is the northern place to be.

In his previous life Anton used to be a math’s teacher but in his current life he still uses these skills to be an excellent, all round software engineer at nine connections.

The expression “pillar of strength” comes from the fact that Anton always keeps his head cool, his mind clear and his brains up to date, even now when a lot of stuff needs to be done.

Regarding his looks some female colleagues see a new Marlon Brando in him. Do we need to say more?

In the end Anton is blessed with a great sense of humor and is a great family man. Besides solving complicated mathematical formulas, you also make him happy with Barack Obama, slow coffee and beer.

Next week coming up: Heleen van Lier

By: Marjolein Horst

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Bring on movember!

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Hashtag hookers high jacked #Sandy, now what?

The last days not only the US media but media worldwide were absorbed by the developments around Frankenstorm Sandy. Dozens of websites launched live blogs to keep readers up-to-date with the latest news. In fact, live blogs have become the defacto tool for covering breaking news, as the majority of readers like to have the feeling of experiencing the news while it happens. Tuesday, I was also live blogging the latest news on hurricane Sandy for the Dutch newspaper website I work for. Maintaining a live blog is madness. Of course it has to be extremely up-to-date and it has to add value, or else you’ll lose readers’ interest. Even in those moments where nothing really new seems to happen, live blogs must be updated frequently - or else ...right, readers will lose interest.

Social media To do this, you have to look at news wires, constantly check the important US news sites and their live video streams, call correspondents, type along with - for example - the live streamed press conference of mayor Bloomberg, and surely don’t miss out on important stuff and the little gems on social media. Oh and did I mention that you’ll have to write flawless because you publish directly? Undoubtedly, social media has become my most valuable source of information. Like I always do when breaking news happens, I set up a few columns on Tweetdeck and let the great people of Twitter stroll around the infinite internet for me and filter out the gems. Opinion leaders give me their opinions - saves me a call or 100 - eyewitnesses tweet their reports, pictures, and video’s, smart people give me ideas, inspiration and funny people deliver a highly necessary bright note. I truly love the combination of social media and journalism. I embrace social media fully and even went as far as dedicating a year of my career to teach my colleagues how to use it. But this time I suddenly felt overwhelmed and annoyed by Twitter. The hashtag #Sandy was totally high jacked by hashtag hookers - a big plague these days. I even clicked on a spam link - I get spam links via Twitter and e-mail on a daily basis but they’ve never fooled me. What at first sight appeared to be an interesting tweet was later a link to an acne site. Yes, I shamefully admit that I was fooled.

The problem with a natural disaster like Sandy is that it concerns so many people in such a large area; it’s hard to make relevant Twitter lists or filter out spam by using location searches. When it comes to politics or cycling, the right lists are already out there and have been made by others or myself (I only have to check which lists Lance Armstrong appears in and I can get a quick overview of how the cycling world responds to the news). Of course, I quickly made a small list of Mayors, Governors and some other important people - but the scope is too narrow if you want to find unique angles. Twitter tries to deal with this serious problem with its ‘top tweets’ that also have local relevance. Sorry Twitter, this doesn’t help. I don’t want to have the RSS-tweets of Dutch media in my top tweets, I’m not looking for that. They’re irrelevant and mainstream, and it’s not uncommon they’re over an hour old. They’re prehistoric in live blogging terms! Because of this, there is a growing need for a smart news tool that can deliver news worth sharing and news worth blogging fast. Nine connections is one of the tools that does exactly that. It filters out the noise and organizes the important news stories in a way that makes sense. I think this will be the future of social media in journalism.

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Meet the nine faces: Daria

Face III: Daria Nepriakhina

'Still waters run deep’

Age, behaviour, countries; everything in life seems to have boundaries. Except for love. Love passes over borders easily and our Ukrainian Designer Daria has proved that.

She met her Dutch prince three years ago in her hometown Lviv; caught him and never let him go. Before she could follow Robin back in Holland, she had to prepare for Dutch language exams, and arrange all necessary documents.

Moving to Holland not only meant a new adventure, but Daria also had to leave her loving parents and her successful job at Stepico, a digital agency where she could free her creative mind.

Daria has been working at nine connections as a visual designer for half a year now and thanks to her, our homepage will have a shiny new look within a few days. Before we release our new app, Daria is giving the last details some final touch.

At the office we describe Daria as the hard-working type. She is modest, intelligent, and calm. She also has a passion for fashion, as it kind of comes with the territory. 

Next Week: Anton Zeef

by Marjolein Horst

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Meet the nine faces (Week II)

Week II: Christian Vogel (friends call him Chris)

'A born connector' 

Although we are in the 4th quarter of 2012, for Chris this time of the year has a special meaning, especially December. On the 19th he's turning 40! That makes him the wisest professional of nine connections.

Chris is highly skilled and maybe a little too smart: He studied Information Technology and wouldn’t mind going back to studying again at the university. 

As one of the initiators of nine connections, Chris is responsible for the speed and quality of our app's engine. He also improves and expands the proprietary technology for more intelligence. 

NXAPI, iMac-display, modules, barista, South Park, Sony 700NX, are keywords he 'REALLY' uses at least 5 times a day.

There's a Dutch song, which is says: Don't marry before you reach 40s: So now Chris is reaching the age and considers relocating from slow hometown Weesp for a more animated life in Amsterdam! 

* If you'll ever meet Chris, don't forget to mention the word 'coffee': His baby blue eyes will suddenly begin to sparkle and you can be sure he’ll take you to the best coffee-spots in town!

Next week: Daria Nepriakhina

by Marjolein Horst