Bob Wyman of PubSub has just written a killer post on the future of blogging (or one of them...). An excerpt:
"What Kedrosky is speaking of is what we at PubSub have been referring to as "Structured Blogging" and may be what Mark Fletcher of Bloglines/AskJeeves has listed as "Functional Blogging" in presentations he's recently given. The basic idea is to go beyond "mere" text in blogs and include structured XML that describes job-openings, events, new prices, press releases, updates to phone numbers and contact info, requests for proposals, etc. i.e. Using the now almost ubiquitous content syndication network to broadcast useful business *data* -- not just prose or text commentaries. Blogging, or the more general idea of "syndication", will have its most important and profitable impact on business by providing a new and effective way for businesses to broadcast data. The result is that in the future, we'll see "blogging" built into corporate systems (ERP, CRM, etc.) that process data -- not text."
I went looking for some info on Bloglines "functional blogging" and all I came up with was a hint from Mark Fletcher during a speech that Ross Mayfield blogged:
"Future developments: Convergence with web search, Mutimedia, functional RSS feeds for more than just news, Richer blogging tools, more sharing and social networking features. 3.6 repeat visits per day on average. Sticky vital part of their online experiences. Share your information and feeds with other people in your network."
(emphasis mine)
This is an interesting subject. I myself have been noodling away on a business idea for 'the future of blogging', but more on that in good time.
This week: AP's RSS feeds, Enterprise RSS developments
(Newsgator, Nooked), professional bloggers (Kottke, Darren Rowse), Odeo (podcasting),
Ajax. p.s. headers in honour of the Oscars.
And the winner is: Associated Press! ...um, or Reuters. Because they both have RSS feeds. Hmm, seems the Oscars theme for this post has already broken down. Anyway, AP joined the RSS revolution this week and so now the two brandname news collectives have them. Susan Mernit broke the news and has the main details. Jeff Jarvis wonders how the RSS brand-building moves by AP and Reuters will affect their customers. Moonwatcher has an interesting take on that too: "Media brands are finding their content atomized, their brands diluted, and their content wholesalers going retail."
PaidContent.org has some quotes from an AP honcho, who says "it's really a strategy to drive traffic to member news sites as well as to AP news."
Ultimately, I think it's a strategy to raise the profile and impact of AP's brand. I'm following all this closely, because I'm intensely curious to see how Tom Curley's (President and CEO of AP) "content will be more important than its container" theories will be put into practice.
Again the Oscars analogy breaks down, because there is more going on in the Enterprise space than the two companies I'm about to mention. But humour me... Firstly, Newsgator is an RSS Aggregator that I've not written enough about (compared to Bloglines especially). But they're doing some very interesting things in the Enterprise space. Greg Reinacker recently announced the NewsGator platform roadmap. He said: "Our general plan here is to expose nearly everything in NewsGator Online via API, and allow folks to build applications that leverage our platform in unique ways." Also Charlie Wood (aka Moonwatcher, one of my current fave blogs) has joined Newsgator as its VP, Enterprise Solutions. Charlie was hired due to his blog, something I'm still waiting (im)patiently to happen to me! :-)
Another company doing good things in the Enterprise is Nooked. They specifically target corporate comms people - their main bullet point is to "Use RSS to deliver real-time marketing information directly to journalist and clients". Nooked recently launched a directory of corporate RSS feeds, a manually-edited Yahoo-style directory. NB: Fergus Burns, the Nooked CEO, did email me with that news. But I've had my eye on Nooked for a while now, so I'm not mentioning them just because he emailed me. Although he did say he's a fan of my blog, so that always helps ;-)
This was a high-profile meme this week, thanks mainly to Jason Kottke announcing that he will be running kottke.org as a full-time job from now on. He's calling it a "micropatron" business model, because he's asking his many readers to chip in with micropayments. He's eschewing advertising entirely, which is a brave move but one which probably only he and a few others could pull off. Already he's gotten a lot of attention and loads of people have blogged that they've given him money. So it seems to be working.
Also a blogger from across the ditch from me, Darren Rowse from Australia, caused a lot of people to get green with envy when he revealed he's earning six figues (US money!) via his blogging activities. The small print? He has 17 blogs and posts around 25 posts per day 7 days per week. Also it's worth noting how he came up with the six figure figure: "the figure is calculated on a number of income sources including private advertising deals, affiliate programs, impression based ad programs, Adsense, BlogAds, text ads and blog consulting revenues etc."
So it includes "consulting". It also seems to be the result of a lot of daily sweat for Darren to make that kind of money - i.e. grind, work. It's not from blogging about The Dukes of Hazard, that's for sure.
Hands down this award goes to Evan Williams' (of Blogger fame) Odeo, which got enviable coverage from The NY Times. It upset Dave Winer in particular, who thinks he's not being given enough credit for helping to invent podcasting. I think he's got a point, but I would be remiss if I didn't in turn point out Lucas Gonze's efforts in another 'credit where credit is due' campaign re podcasting.
btw, speaking of giving credit... it's great to see Dave Winer has resurrected the Two-Way Web blog. That sub-blog of Dave's was a key influence early in my blog career - ref my very first R/WW post.
Ajax is the trendy method of developing Web 2.0 apps right now. Ajax means "Asynchronous JavaScript + XML" and according to the write-up "it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web." I got a lot out of this article, however I was brought back down to earth with a thud when I emailed the article around to the programmers in my team at work. I was informed that those techniques (especially the xmlHttpRequest object) have been around for a while now and, although they're now supported by most browsers, they can be expensive for an organisation to deploy. Point humbly taken. I'll give the last word though to Jon Udell, who says: "The modern browser is an XML-aware client. Savvy Web developers have known about these features for a while, but now Google has legitimized them and pushed them squarely into the mainstream."
'Journey to the (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google'. That must go down as the silliest title for a tech article this year, nevertheless GQ's profile of Google was an interesting read. After that I happened to browse around the GQ website and saw an interview with Russell Crowe. He was named by GQ as the greatest actor of our generation. Johnny Depp and Nicholas Cage were 2 and 3 (personally I'd rate Cage number 2, based mainly on his performance in Vampire's Kiss - one of my favourite movies).
I read the long interview with Crowe and particularly enjoyed these quotes:
"If it’s not going to be that serious, I don’t want to do it. It’s a personal taste. I don’t like watching an actor have the same fucking hairdo from time period to time period, from character to character—I just think it’s bullshit. It’s a waste of money and a waste of my time as an audience member."
And a bit later...
"I get a very deep sense that the generation after Generation X is a very conservative generation, and I’m not sure they understand the commitment part of what I do."
Crowe goes on to talk about how he wanted to play Shakespeare in the movie Shakespeare in Love:
"It was a 100 percent fucking home run, except the central character of William Shakespeare was not a fucking writer—he was not smelly enough, he was not unshaven enough, and obviously hadn’t had enough to drink. He was some prissy pretty boy. What the fuck? That’s so disrespectful."
And you had in mind a smelly, unshaven, drunk guy you thought could do it?
"Yeah, I wanted to see that grizzly fucker. I wanted to see him flower. I wanted to see him blossom under the fact of love. I wanted to see where the sonnets came from. They came from the same pen of despair that wrote Timon of Athens—I wanted to see that guy. I wanted to see that guy with the sensibilities of a man that could create a body of work that would last century after century. I wanted to see that."
And you wanted to be that?
"I wanted to play that character. I loved the script. I mean, it was an incredibly well observed script about actors. That’s why I thought it was so cool."
Do you still think your version would have been better?
"[laughs] By fucking miles, mate. What are you talking about?"
Fantastic interview...
First, some context...
Jay Rosen, in the "after matter" of his article on the New York Times purchase of About.com, posts an email response from Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen said:
"The real secret of About.com is that they have figured out a way to get 500 domain experts to work for peanuts, in return for the exalted status as "guides." But the NYTimes could probably have done that on its own by throwing a little prestige and a few thousand dollars at the top bloggers in each of the targeted areas they wanted to cover.
Somebody who already has a prestigious brand could duplicate About.com in a year for less than $50M. And anybody could do it in two years for $150M."
Giann Trotta, a "founding editor at About.com" responded:
"I was a founding editor at About.com back in 1997, and I agree wholeheartedly with Neilsen's take on this [...] Another company's whose SEO performance complemented the get 'em to write for peanuts approach was epinions.com -- enter any product name, and odds are they'll come up in the top three. They've since been bought by shopping.com in a very shrewd move."
Now to the meat of this post...
As a writer whose goal is to (very soon) earn a decent living via blogging, I wonder how viable the 'work for peanuts' approach of About.com is nowadays.
About.com websites were/are successful because of the About.com brand-name and the generic design. And, to be frank, it's mostly all generic writing too - which is part of the whole About.com brand package.
The world of blogging, on the other hand, is one where individual writers with some flair and personality - let's call it a 'brand' - can build up a readership and maybe make a little money on the side. Why work for peanuts at About.com when you can earn peanuts off your own blog? :-)
But of course the point I'm driving at is that you can earn more than peanuts if you get the branding right. Seems to me there are two aspects to blog branding - building a 'personal' brand (a 'voice') and having a 'business' brand (or 'platform' may be a better description).
Just today Jason Kottke announced that he will be running kottke.org as a full-time job from now on. If anyone is a good example of having a personal, unique 'brand' - it's Jason. It's not just the bright green-yellow logo (which burns into your eyes like a Plasma TV), it's his 'voice' as a blogger and the personal touch.
I reckon Jason has a great chance of earning just as much (if not more) money blogging full-time as he did as a web designer - because:
1. He has a very compelling personal brand/voice.
2. He also has an enviably good business brand to leverage off - a unique and professional design and a very large readership.
What if you don't have a decent business platform to leverage off? Are you consigned to selling yourself for peanuts to the likes of About.com? Not necessarily...
A generic business brand can still work if that brand conveys a network of personal, blog-like voices. weblogsinc and Gawker have this blog essence in their brands, whereas About.com doesn't. When I think of About.com, I (rightly or wrongly) think of the 1990's and website how-to guides. When I think of weblogsinc or Gawker, I associate those brands with blogs and tightly-focused content written by passionate people.
So will you earn more than peanuts at the likes of weblogsinc and gawker? You should, because at least half the value of the blog is from your 'personal' brand. Remember that About.com sites have very little 'personal' branding...
So if you don't have the large audience that Jason Kottke has (let's face it, very very few bloggers do), then you can still make money from your personal brand by either partnering with a blog company like weblogsinc or Gawker, or building your own business brand to complement your personal 'voice'.
Either way, to make a career out of personal blogging you need both a personal 'brand' and a business one.
One of my readers Taewoo Danny Kim recently compared Web 2.0 to the Semantic Web and I think he hit on an important point. He wrote in an email that Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are...
"...basically moving towards the same thing (web as platform) from two different directions: web 2.0 more from the business side and the Semantic Web more from the political (W3C) and academic (research) side."
Here on R/WW I tend to focus on business applications of 'Web as Platform' technologies, so I think twdanny is spot on. I've focused a lot on innovative software companies like Bloglines, Feedburner, Flickr, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, PubSub, etc. But pretty soon I'll start to more fully explore how non-techie businesses are being transformed by Web 2.0.
Over the past couple of months I've had email exchanges with people from various backgrounds: e.g. lawyers, investment analysts, librarians, journalists, marketers, PR people, educators. Plus of course technologists! I've also had emails from Internet executives who've told me they read my blog and like my ideas (much to my delight!).
Web 2.0 is more than just a Silicon Valley phenomenon - it's transforming nearly every industry. There's certainly been a lot of talk about how journalism is being disrupted. I think most other industries are too and I'm planning to explore that in the coming months.
So keep an eye out for a wider range of business-related Web 2.0 stories on Read/Write Web.
If you're a non-geek reading this, I'd love to know what interests you about Web technology and how you believe it is transforming your career or life. Plus if you have any specific topics you'd like me to write about, let me know! In either case, please leave a comment here or email me at readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com.
A look back at the week that was in the world of Web 2.0. This week: Google's AutoLinks feature, IE7, NY Times buys About.com, more Big Media blogging coverage, Bloglines hacks.
Ever since Google made it big, many people have been looking for a chance to pin the 'evil' label on them - especially as one of their company philosophies is to 'do no evil'. This week some folks pounced on Google for adding an AutoLink feature to its Google Toolbar. The issue? It has similarities to a controversial old Microsoft feature called SmartTags. According to Google, AutoLink is this:
"The online review of a great new restaurant has the place's address but no map. You could type the restaurant's street, city, and ZIP code into the search box, but why bother, when clicking the Toolbar's AutoLink button will automatically create a link to an online map (US addresses only)? AutoLink can also link package tracking numbers to delivery status, VIN numbers (US) to vehicle history, and publication ISBN numbers to Amazon.com listings."
What's getting folks riled up is that AutoLinks enables Google to create links to their own content, using your webpage as the context. According to CNet News:
"...trademark attorneys and security experts say that AutoLink could face problems, because Google modifies the underlying HTML of a Web page to deliver the added links."
There's a beauty of a conspiracy theory attached to this too. Slashdot explains:
"Jeff Reynar - was the lead SmartTag Program Manager while at MS and is reportedly now a Google Product Manager who's being credited as AutoLink's creator."
The most interesting thing about this for me is the annotation angle. Annotation has long been a desired feature for web browsers - e.g. the W3C's browser/editor Amaya has extensive annotation features. Anil Dash is one person keen on annotation in this manner - he suggested on his blog (also quoted by CNet) that "once your HTML page gets to my machine, it's mine to rip, mix and burn.".
Speaking of browsers... the much anticipated Internet Explorer 7 was announced by Microsoft this week. Only trouble is, there's little evidence of innovation. The upgrade seems to be mostly about improved security. Also the beta IE7 won't be available until "this summer" (US summer that is). So, like, what's to get excited about? Or as I mentioned in Scoble's comments section: "What, no read/write browser? No RSS aggregation? Where's the innovation, c'mon..."
To be fair, maybe there will be some innovation in the backend - as Jeremy Wright suggests. But I'd like to see some real ground broken, for a change...
The New York Times announced they will buy About.com for $410 million. There was a great meme going round the week leading up this: About.com represents blogging 1.0, whereas the likes of weblogsinc and Gawker are blogging 2.0. My take on that theory is here. Nevertheless lots of people think the NY Times deal was a good one for the venerable newspaper. My picks for in-depth analysis: Susan Mernit, paidcontent.org (plus audio interview), VC Fred Wilson, John Battelle (great headline too! "About The New York Times: Deep Into Web 2.0 Now"), Jay Rosen, NY Times article.
Key Quotes:
Martin
Nisenholtz, CEO of New York Times Digital: "The model we've acquired is a web 2.0
model; it's not a centralized model, it's a decentralized model where the content is
created by passionate individuals who have a competency and a desire to reach the public
and that scales into many, many categories and it scales potentially
geographically."
(emphasis mine)
Fred Wilson nails it: "If the content that is created on the edges starts to show up in the middle and the content that is created in the middle starts to show up on the edges, that will be a big deal."
John Battelle: "I think microcontent is key to winning in the Web 2.0 publishing world." [and] "As Martin told me when I pinged him after the deal: 'We're deep into Web 2.0 now.'"
Jay Rosen: "The second life of content, made possible by search, is of critical importance to journalists whose work is on the Web. (That's almost all journalists.)"
Ahhh, a warm fuzzies Associated Press article about SixApart: "The couple's odd chemistry cooked up Six Apart Ltd., a startup that has helped popularize the "blogging" craze, with millions of people worldwide maintaining online personal journals that dissect everything from politics to poultry."
Poultry??
In other news Weblogs Inc was named as one of BusinessWeek's Five Net Names to Watch in '05, which founder Jason Calacanis was obviously chuffed about.
Commenting on the above two stories, Slashdot notes: "Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry".
Rather than a single techy post, it was two bits of Web 2.0 hackery that caught my attention this week. Firstly, Erik Benson managed to convert his entire weblog into a Bloglines API-powered site:
"I made a folder in Bloglines that has all of the RSS feeds around the web that have stuff that I've written/done. Then I used the Bloglines Web Service to get an aggregated, normalized feed of all my content in one stream..."
He explains how he did it in a later post (nb: I noted in the comments that it'd be cool to make this available to us non-programmers via an easy-to-use web service).
Speaking of Bloglines (which I nearly always do in these weekly wrap-ups), Joshua Tyler has created a neat app called Chameleon, built using the Bloglines Web Services. It's basically an alternative interface to Bloglines and has some nifty personalization features, such as keeping track of "which feeds you read, how often, and when". I've had a play round with it and it's a great example of value-add using a publicly available API.
That's it for another week. As always, I value your feedback. Please leave a comment or send me an email at readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com.
It's been a while since I've published a book review on R/WW, so I'm going to briefly review 5 books that I've read during the past few months. Four of them are Web Technology-related and the other was an eBook that I bought.
The Nudist on the Late Shift : And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley by Po Bronson
is a book I've been meaning to read for ages. I read his latest, What Should I Do
With My Life?, last year and that was an inspiring read. He's one of the 'new
journalism' type writers that I so admire - Tom Wolfe and Micheal Lewis are my two
favourites in that genre (more on Wolfe below).
Po Bronson started out with two novels and Nudist on the Late Shift was his third published book. He calls it "literary nonfiction" and it tells the tale of various Silicon Valley workers and companies. He covers some of the successful people - e.g. the guy who invented Hotmail and sold it for a heap of money to Microsoft. But he also writes about the strugglers - those who dream big but haven't yet hit the jackpot. The chapter about Silicon Valley salesmen best exemplified the strugglers.
One of the most compelling parts of the book was his description of meeting Danny Hillis, the genuis computer programmer who created The Clock of the Long Now. [According to Wikipedia: "A clock built to last 10,000 years or more, powered by seasonal climactic fluctuations. The clock is not yet built, but a piece of land in rural Nevada has been purchased, the design is completed in detail, and construction of the components is underway."]
I also enjoyed Bronson's descriptions of the Valley, because it's my own personal dream to live and work there one day. Bronson described it as a hot and scenically unspectacular place. However it attracts a certain type of creative and ambitious person - and it's this that drives the narrative of the book.
My rating: 9/10. Nudist is a fantastic read and despite the cautionary tales, it only makes me want to visit Silicon Valley even more!
amazon.com - Get Big Fast : Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the
World, by Robert Spector is a biography of Jeff Bezos. It's a nice business-oriented
read, complete with "takeaways" at the end of each chapter (generic business lessons like
"Always brace for competition and be ready to strike back"). I don't think I learned much
new about Bezos or Amazon. Spector had access to a couple of early employees, but not
Bezos himself - discounting an early interview he did with him.
My rating: 6/10. It was a pleasant read but nothing to get too excited about.
Movable Type 3.0 Bible Desktop Edition, by Rogers Cadenhead. I won a free copy of
this from Rogers'
weblog. I've leafed through it and it's a comprehensive how-to for the latest version
of Movable Type. A lot of the early chapters are aimed at new bloggers, e.g. Ch 5 'Writing
a weblog entry', but there's some meaty stuff for more experienced users later in the
book. I plan to test out some of the XML-RPC material in the coming weeks.
My rating: 8/10. This is a very handy reference for me to have around (I'm an MT user) and the technical content in the second half of the book is something for me to get stuck into when I get some time to tinker.
Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham. This is a book
that seems to polarize people. Paul Graham writes opinionated essays and he gets under the wick of many programmers for his dismissal of languages like Java and... well
pretty much any programming language except for his beloved Lisp. Having said that, as a
non-programmer I enjoyed the parts of Hackers and Painters that I could understand! (I
got through everything but a couple of chapters at the end about spam filtering and heavy
duty programming).
He wrote some interesting things about web-based applications, which is Web 2.0 territory. e.g. on pg 58 he wrote: "The whole idea of 'your computer' is going away, and being replaced with 'your data'." Also on pgs 79-80 he wrote an excellent explanation of the transition from mainframes to desktops to the server - I highly recommend that passage.
My rating: 7. An enjoyable read, but you're likely to disagree with some parts of it.
I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe. I read this via eBook and I promised I'd let you
know how the reading experience went. It was mostly good, but with some minor hassles reading
via a small PDA screen. The convenience of having the book always with me, as opposed to a
heavy hardcover book, was a big plus. But it was a bit awkward sometimes reading this
long novel via my PDA - it's summer over here in New Zealand right now, so the sun
glinting on the screen was a problem sometimes. And that old issue of curling up in bed
with a good book - well, at times I did miss the comfort of a paper book. But those are
minor quibbles. All in all, I was pleased with the ebook experience and I will buy more
ebooks.
As for the story itself, well as I mentioned above Tom Wolfe is one of my favourite authors. He pioneered 'new journalism' and is still one of the best Literary Non-fiction (and fiction) writers around. 'I am Charlotte Simmons' was a highly ambitious book for Wolfe. It is set in a university and the main character is a young very intelligent but socially naive southern girl. Other major characters include a white basketball star in a college team dominated by black players, a frat boy involved in a scandel involving a senator, and a nerdy college kid called Adam. About as far away from the life of Tom Wolfe, a man in his 70's who wears cream-coloured suits, as you can imagine. At times the dialogue seemed to get the better of him - e.g. he was 'awarded' the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex award! - but to be fair at other times the dialogue and characters were utterly compelling. Tom Wolfe is a great writer, very strong on social and moral themes, and overall I think he managed to do justice to this ambitious project.
My rating: 8/10. If you're a Tom Wolfe fan, this book won't disappoint. Flawed in some respects, but there's more than enough evidence of Wolfe's genius in this lengthy novel.
Andrew Nachison from The Media Centre raises some interesting issues regarding RSS content aggregation. He boils it down to these 3 questions:
I agree with Andrew's conclusion: "This isn't an “either/or” theory but a “both/and” reality." P.S. also check out The Media Center Matrix. Rich Skrenta from Topix.net has a similar view: "For comprehensiveness, algorithmic techniques will have to come into play. People-powered systems just don't scale to the long tail."
I too think there's a middle ground to machine and human/social aggregation. Currently I think we're probably nearing the peak of human/social feed aggregation, in percentage terms. What I mean by that is that the average blogger/reader probably subscribes to 80-90% human feeds and 10-20% machine feeds - and most of the latter would be egofeeds from the likes of PubSub, Technorati, Feedster (sometimes egofeeds of other people :-). So topic and tag RSS feeds are at a very early stage of adoption - companies like PubSub, Findory and Topix are leading the way.
From now on in, machine aggregation can really only increase its percentage of attention - while human feeds will decrease. But don't worry, because it's not a zero sum game. Aggregation as a market will continue to increase at a great rate. Even though the ratio of human-to-machine feeds will even up in the coming years, the whole pie will grow significantly.
Andrew says that "traditional media companies" have in the past "derived enormous profit" from controlling information. But fragmenting audience is quickly moving that control to content aggregators - he specifically cites Google and Yahoo.
The search and aggregation companies are set to profit. And provided a click-through is still required to access full content, niche publishers should also profit too.
One thing to watch is the brewing controversy (or browsting controversy in that case!) over full-content aggregation, which some companies are already attempting to profit from. I wonder also about excerpted content aggregation, or remixes of content - because the boundaries will surely be pushed in those areas too.
Andrew doesn't write much about number 3, so I'll take a punt at it. The control of content is in one sense moving very definitely towards the consumer, or reader (neither term seems to fit in this age of the read/write web!). This is something I've been exploring over the past months and which continues to fascinate me. RSS Aggregators and topic/tag feeds are two technologies that in a very real sense give power back to the user. I choose (by subscribing) what content flows into my Aggregator. I choose which of a million niche topics to track by RSS.
However as Andrew points out in his post, Google and Yahoo - and apps like Bloglines - are the main tools now for accessing the datastream. Their influence over the datastream is increasingly important - you can see evidence of this in Google's highly profitable advertising business.
Elise Bauer has posted a comprehensive analysis of Weblog Authoring Tools market share. As with RSS Aggregator market share stats, there are a lot of caveats. But much can be gleaned from Elise's post, which is a continuation of an analysis she did in August 2004. The data is gathered from what Elise calls "Google Share", which is a formula based on Google indexes of weblog authoring tools (focusing on US users).
- The top 3 tools are Blogger (35%), LiveJournal (20%), and TypePad (18%, with a comment by Elise that TypePad is underrepresented due to 30% of their users being "password-protected, non-indexed blogs"). The top 3 make up a staggering 73% - or nearly 3/4 - of the weblog authoring tool market! Note also that the top 3 are all browser-based authoring systems.
- What most surprised me is that Movable Type and Wordpress have reduced to 3% and 2% market share respectively. They were 7% and 4% respectively back in August 2004. So they've dropped share from 11% to only 5% of the total. Yet how much buzz and whuffie do those two systems enjoy among geeks? Much more than that.
This indicates that MT and Wordpress do not have a bright future as mainstream consumer tools. However as Elise commented, MT and Wordpress "may find a home in corporate deployments however, as these customers have the means and the need to host their own weblogs, rather than use a third party service."
- There's a really cool graphic called "Growth Share Matrix", which looks much like a planetary system. If so, then Blogger (owned by Google) is the Sun and LJ and TypePad are Jupiter and Saturn. So MT and Wordpress are Earth and Mars? :-)
- Elise comments that "Typepad continues to be an anomaly. Trailing only Blogger in both share and growth, Typepad - a fee-based service - is gaining share in a field of free services."
I attribute this to the customization features that TypePad offers. Both Blogger and LJ have very limited customization functionality, and MT and Wordpress are generally too difficult for average non-technical users to customize. So TypePad offers a unique service (combining customization with ease-of-use) that is obviously well valued in the market.
- Six Apart, which owns LiveJournal, TypePad and MT, has over 40% market share, making it "the number one provider of weblog tools and services". But both Microsoft and Google have potential to grow their share significantly, so SixApart will have their work cut out keeping that lead (assuming they don't get acquired themselves).
- I have to admit to some surprise that Blogger is so dominant in these stats (the conspiracy theorist in me may be inclined to point out that this analysis is based on Google's data, so... but nah!). Elise says that Blogger is "growing much faster than the average of all of the tools, and twice as fast as the Technorati Index", but TypePad isn't far behind in terms of growth.
Why does Blogger's growth and number 1 position surprise me? Because Google hasn't put any effort into developing or promoting Blogger this past year. What happens when they finally do start to "aggressively pursue" (using Elise's phrasing) this market?! Maybe The Sun metaphor I used will turn out to be appropriate in the long run...
Those are some initial thoughts (in two takes). Thanks Elise for posting such a detailed analysis. Interesting times...
What's been happening in the world of "Web two dot oh" (as Jeff Bezos pronounces it) this week? Let's find out.
The Bloglines sale to Ask Jeeves continued to generate chatter in the blogosphere, including from yours truly. To sum up: Bloglines got a big payout and the public discovered that Ask Jeeves still exists, which no doubt pleased Ask Jeeves. Bonus points go to Eric Lunt from Feedburner, who predicted the acquisition way back in September 2004!
In other news, the goal-setting app 43 Things got a nice positive write-up from Salon... and 24 hours later got kneecapped by a particularly nasty piece of gutter journalism from the same publication! Shame on you Salon. Luckily for us bloggers, we can read the real story from The Robot Co-op themselves and reputable people like Jason Kottke.
First I noticed Blogbinders, a company that seemed to sprout out of the LiveJournal community (my write-up of them). Then John Battelle started promoting a company called Qoop, which has a slick website and a product line with "Q" stuck on the front of each product name: Q-Print, Q-Publish, Q-Search... you get the picture, very Q-Cute. John Battelle got a free book of his blog by them (he has "a buddy who is involved in Qoop"), so looks like they're getting all the buzz. Nothing wrong with that, it's great marketing by Qoop. But Blogbinders seems like a cool little company, so worthy of some attention too. Don't forget Lulu.com, they're another print-on-demand company doing good things.
Feedburner posted some cool stats about podcasting. They speculated that the market for specialized RSS clients looks promising: "There's a very interesting statistic that highlights how different the RSS world will be from the web 1.0 world. Specialized podcasting clients have quickly entered the ranks of the top RSS clients..."
On this theme, bit of news this week about branded RSS Aggregators - e.g. CNET's Newsburst and Guardian newspaper.
Steve Rubel suggested that "the RSS revolution will force online news sites to evolve into aggregators to retain their eyeball base" and Dave Winer was also enthusiastic: "Bottom-line: Aggregator software and the news business, looking forward, are very tightly bound."
I thought I'd add another feature to my weekly Web 2.0 wrap-ups. Every week I read something new about the technical side of Web 2.0 which inspires me. This week's tech article to check out is from lixo.org, a new blog. He wrote an interesting post entitled Web Services APIs. A choice quote:
"...everytime I think of a useful service on the web, I end up sketching out its API first, figure out a few interesting uses for it, and then decide if it’s worth or not implementing."
Well that's it for another week. No witty headers this week, I'm sorry. I'll bring them back next week. btw if you have any suggestions for Weekly Wrap-up, do leave a comment or drop me a line at my Gmail address (readwriteweb AT Gmail DOT com).
