Try saying that three times fast! Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson recently had another chat with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher. The resulting post from Eric pretty much confirms my theory that Bloglines was scared off its contextual advertising strategy by vocal publishers (big and small). Here's what Eric wrote:
"[...] It turns out that Mark and the folks at Ask Jeeves may ditch the advertising idea entirely (no "AdWords on steroids" after all). Mark said that Jeeves has determined that "in some scenarios Bloglines would not have to generate revenue" and that there may be more value in using Bloglines to introduce subscribers to other Jeeves offerings.
He's not saying context-based advertising in Bloglines is dead but given the heat he has taken his new position makes sense. Forget the fact that they needed to find an advertising partner that would be willing and able to serve ads against content and context, having to continuously respond to grumpy bunnies who want their feeds culled from Bloglines would surely have become a full-time job for Mark or his lawyers."
Eric goes on to ask how Bloglines' competitors will respond if some bloggers "aren't okay having ads shown adjacent to their "content" (despite the fact that they should be publishing a summary feed.)"
Firstly, I think the 'why not just publish excerpted feeds' argument is a red herring. Publishers should retain the right to publish full feeds and have a copyright on that if they so desire. Sure having an excerpted feed is the practical thing to do if you want to protect your content from contextual advertising, but there are a lot of benefits to having a full feed and I don't see why publishers should forgo that. For example, as a reader a lot of times I like to scan a post in my RSS Aggregator before clicking through to it. So as a publisher, I want to give readers that option. And that's just one benefit of a full feed, there are many others...
The larger issue is: in what situations is contextual advertising OK? Due to what happened with Bloglines, we now know that putting contextual advertising in RSS Aggregators around full-feed content is a no-no. What about the other scenarios though? Here are some:
1) Is it OK to put adverts around content summaries? For example, My Yahoo only does headlines or short excerpts for RSS feeds. If they put adverts around feed excerpts, will publishers allow that? Bear in mind that Yahoo could potentially earn thousands of dollars off your feed from such a scenario, given their huge user base and leverage with advertisers.
Gabe pointed in my comments to a conversation SiliconBeat had with Rich Skrenta of Topix:
"Topix does run ads next to its news headlines, but hasn't faced problems. Skrenta says the legal threat from publishers is overblown, if it exists at all. He says among all the publishers he's talked with, none has raised legal questions about Topix' business model. Most are just happy to have Topix driving traffic to their sites."
So the current opinion seems to be that it would be OK. However the issue would be more fully tested if a big player like Yahoo (or Bloglines) announced such a strategy. Until that happens, the jury is still out IMO.
2) Charles Coxhead asked in my comments: "what if the advertising is just dumb ads (not contextual), so doesn't rely on the aggregated content itself to drive context. Does this make a difference?"
RM says: I suspect it wouldn't matter if the adverts were contextual or not. The issue is that someone else is making money off your content.
3) What about people who copy entire posts from other bloggers and paste them into their own blogs? What if they ran adverts around that content?
I have a couple of readers who every now and then copy and paste a whole post from R/WW and publish it on their own weblog. They don't seem to be making money off it with adverts or sponsorships etc, so generally I'm OK with it as long as they only do it occasionally and always give me linked attribution. It's a Remix Culture after all. I would be upset however if people were clearly making money off my writing, without my permission.
I actually have a full copyright on my blog, although I could just as well have the Creative Commons attribution and non-commercial licence. Don't get me wrong, I love the CC licences and think they are the future of copyright. Indeed I released my draft novel and other creative writing on a CC licence. But for my blog I'm sticking with the traditional copyright (for now) because there are still some grey areas around Creative Commons. The RSS Aggregator issues outlined above are perhaps examples of those grey areas.
Those are some of the issues facing the current crop of RSS Aggregators - and content producers too. While Bloglines has all but opted out of this controversy now, it's an issue that will continue to simmer through 2005 and flare up occasionally.
Update: Feedburner to the rescue? Josh Hallett in response to my post asks: "Somebody needs to create a product to provide RSS feed owners a percentage of the advertising revenue from sites that syndicate their content. Feedburner?" And true to form, a Feedburner rep is quick to respond. Dick Costolo replies in Josh's comments: "We are on top of this and are investigating tools and services to address this very issue. There are a growing number of these sites, publishers are generally unaware of the issue (at least as regards the number of these sites that exist), and there is little or no way for the personal publisher to track their content as its repurposed with surrounding ads. A perfect thing for us to deal with." Go Feedburner!!
Andrew Watson suggests that my post about Bloglines being scared off its advertising strategy would make a great Oliver Stone movie :-) Heh, I won't sell my screenplay to Stone for less than a cool million! ;-) Seriously though, it's possible my post did sound like a Conspiracy Theory, but I suspect what I wrote is spot-on and Jason Calacanis agrees. If it's true, then it highlights once again that Mark Fletcher is a very smart cookie. He put his ear to the ground, didn't like the sound of the approaching freight train of content producers, so decided to sell up while the going was still good. Brilliant!
Speaking of conspiracy theories, read this from Rafat Ali over at PaidContent.org and tell me it's not a very similar situation to the one Bloglines found itself in:
"My conspiracy theory: why have sites like Google News and Newsbot been in beta for so long, and will perhaps not come out of it for a long time? Well, they have no idea how to get any revenues off them, without getting into controversy...the controversy being that if they start putting ads against this news search content, like they do for general search results, the content providers will cry foul. As it is, the content players are queasy and have a rather delicate relationship with the likes of Google News. So the "beta" tag is a convenient way to wait out the uncertain period and see what models develop later on..."
NB: emphasis mine.
Noah Brier also has some thoughts on this. He says that "if Bloglines gives me a very good product (which I believe it does), I can deal with some advertising so that it remains free as long as it's in good taste and not overwhelming." As he later points out though, that's the consumer angle. The contentious point is on the content producer side of the equation. Jason Calacanis said that "protecting publishers and authors is NOT anti-blogosphere" and I largely agree with him, with the following caveats:
For small-scale content producers, provided that Bloglines gave bloggers a slice of the pie (a la Google Ad Sense), then I think most smaller content producers would be happy. But when it comes to those content producers who have the ability to generate their own advertising sales (like Gawker and Weblogs Inc), that's where Bloglines' proposed advertising strategy becomes a conflict. And don't forget there will be a minority of smaller content producers who also complain (e.g. Schwimmer) and they will make a lot of noise and generate bad publicity for Bloglines. They may even make legal challenges - especially if they are lawyers (like Schwimmer). Which all spells bad news for Bloglines' advertising business model, even if they managed to keep the majority of (small) content producers assuaged.
So I think the above, in a nutshell, is why the contextual advertising strategy would not have worked for Bloglines and why they backed out of it very quickly.
Lots of twists and turns in this plot, so it would indeed make a great movie :-) A suggested title: "Content Wars: Episode Web 2.0". Oliver, you're welcome to make an offer in the comments...
You may be getting sick of '2.0' being stuck onto the end of everything, but I can't resist pointing to this excellent post by VC Fred Wilson. He characterises the mid-to-late 90's era of Web content creation companies like About.com (ex-The Mining Company), Geocities and Tripod as "blogging 1.0". The likes of Denton's Gawker, Calacanis' Weblogs Inc and Boyd's Corante are "blogging 2.0". They are the next generation of what the About.com's of the 90's represented - personal, 'amateur' topic-focused content.
Fred tells a nice little anecdote of venture capitalism in the 90's (I'm currently reading Po Bronson's Nudist on the late shift, about Silicon Valley in that era, so I'm in that frame of mind already...). Fred writes:
"In early 1997, a couple months after we invested in Geocities, Scott Kurnit walked into our office with a plan to start a business called The Mining Company. It was Geocities and Tripod with a different twist. Instead of hosting free web sites, Scott was going to recruit people (now called bloggers) to create web content using a platform similar to what Geocities and Tripod had built. But Scott's model was a more traditional media model in the sense that he would pick the content creators instead of inviting everyone to create content on his site."
So now we're in 2005 and we have blogging 2.0, which Fred sees as different to 1.0 in 4 ways: posts, permalinks, RSS, and "CPC and contextual ad networks". He also talks about "a media model around the Blogging 2.0 platform".
Jeff Jarvis wrote about a similar thing in another post. He said that "if you were starting About.com today, you wouldn't create a centralized marketplace of cheap content." He prefers the decentralization model. The comments to that were very interesting, with some support for the About.com model. Anil Dash compared About.com to weblogsinc and gawker (this was perhaps the inspiration for Fred's post?). Jason Calacanis agreed with Anil in Jeff's comments, saying that "Gawker and WIN are next generation About.com's to a certain extent."
Interestingly, an About.com employee also left a comment on Jeff's blog. I have to say, it sounds a wee bit sniffy about blogs:
"I've been active with About.com for over five years now. Our activities as guides have changed dramatically over the years. Nowadays we are following much a of blog-like model, but there's a lot of structure in the way we write. We also host databases of links to complement the blog-like centerpiece.
It can be a lot more than the stream-of-consciousness that many blogs are today. I've positioned my site as a resource for seasoned business professionals seeking to better understand the business of biotechnology and entrepreneurial scientists seeking to commercialize their ideas and inventions.
I find the prospect of working for the NYT very compelling. If the sale goes through, I'd be eager to hear what changes it would bring to my site."
RM says: Believe it or not, some of us bloggers are serious about our writing too. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Online Diary Land any more.
Provocative post by Jason Calacanis on the Bloglines sale. He says it's "a horrible business and it will never make money." The reason? He reckons "95-99% of the RSS reader market" will belong to the Big 3 of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google within 2 years. That's the 'bigco will crush littleco' theory, which is an easy one to throw about (I've done it myself).
What's really intriguing about Jason's post is that he has some interesting inside information about Bloglines' touted contextual advertising strategy. Remember the story that broke back in mid-December when Mark Fletcher spoke to Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson? At the time, very few bloggers linked to it or showed any interest in what Bloglines was planning. But I wrote about it and soon after Mark Fletcher himself referenced my post (after first commenting on my earlier RSS market share post). Mark wrote on 20 December:
"In another post, Richard MacManus points to a blog post by Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson based on a conversation Eric and I had last week. Eric was interested in the business model behind Bloglines. Not accepting my usual stock answer of "Volume!", I detailed that we will integrating highly targetted contextual advertising into Bloglines next year, or "Adwords on Steroids" as Eric puts it (I like that description!). To reiterate what I told Eric, when we do start to roll out advertising, we will be very sensitive to user feedback, and we will be looking to our users to help guide us in this area."
With the benefit of hindsight, I'm wondering now if Mark was 'testing the market' with his announcement that Bloglines would be doing contextual advertising in 2005? He certainly got some swift (and passionate) responses from users - and the outlook wasn't good. Martin Schwimmer, a trademark lawyer, demanded that Bloglines remove his RSS feed from their service and Bloglines quickly complied. The upshot of that case was that although Schwimmer was mostly condemned in the blogosphere for his stance, the fact remained he had highlighted a legal grey area - and Bloglines had backed down.
Now we find out that Jason Calacanis was also having a behind-the-scenes conversation with Mark Fletcher. Here's how Jason puts it in his latest post:
"...after a half dozen emails he [Mark Fletcher] finally got back to me to promise he wouldn’t sell ads against our blogs. He claimed he was just speculating about possibilities. OK, sure.
Of course, he did have to promise me because I—and the other blog publishers out there—would never let him sell ads against our full-feeds, let alone target our users."
So there was a fairly blunt warning that weblogsinc for one would not have put up with contextual adverts wrapped around their content in Bloglines. I suggested in my Web 2.0 weekly wrap-up last week that "the Martin Schwimmer episode might have spooked Bloglines into abandoning their contextual advertising strategy, in favour of quick bucks in the current RSS/blogging investment frenzy". So yes I think that Bloglines was scared off the contextual adverts strategy, by Schwimmer and Calacanis (probably others too).
I also wonder whether it was a purposeful 'leak' by Mark to Eric Peterson back in December, in order to get a gauge on how content producers would react to the advertising idea. It certainly saved him time, money and a lot of grief - imagine if Bloglines had rolled out the contextual adverts and only then found out that users were up in arms about it.
Last week I wrote about topic/tag/remix feeds. I think these may in future become more popular than people feeds. So to follow that up, here are some practical tips on how to get started with topic and tag feeds (I'll address remix feeds in a separate post).
The first thing I need to point out is that topic and tag feeds are essentially just searches for future content. This is how PubSub advertises it in fact - "Search the Future!" is one of their taglines.
Normally when you use Google or MSN, you're searching for past content. So the key difference to traditional web searching is that by subscribing to searches, you automate the process and future results will come flowing to you via RSS. If you have a topic of interest that you want to keep up-to-date with, then it's much simpler to subscribe to searches on that topic and wait for results to come to you - instead of you going looking for them.
So let's get to the nitty gritty. I mentioned PubSub above, so I'll start with them. They're a relatively new kid on the search block, but unlike the others (Google, Yahoo!, etc) PubSub focuses exclusively on 'future search'. It's real simple to get started on PubSub - the homepage has a textbox where you're invited to "create a free PubSub subscription".
Say you want to keep up with the latest news and blog posts on the All Blacks rugby team (I have to use a New Zealand search!). Enter "all blacks" (with the quote marks) into PubSub and it sets up the search. The only drawback for PubSub currently is that often you have to wait a while for results to appear. e.g. it displayed this message for my "all blacks" query: "Right now, we are matching your subscription against millions of new information items as they are created." It asks me to either bookmark the page (how Web 1.0!), subscribe to the page in an RSS Aggregator, or download their browser sidebar tool. This post is all about subscribing to searches using RSS, so I'll go with option 2.
You subscribe to the feed by copying the URL into your favourite RSS Aggregator. Note: I've had problems with some PubSub feeds in Bloglines - but rather than detail it here, because it may actually be a Bloglines issue, I'll email PubSub.
I've personally found PubSub's search feeds to produce the best quality links - consistently. Which I think is a credit to their search algorithms, whatever those might be. The one thing they could improve on is the subscription process. Because the results are often not immediate, it can be confusing for the user to have to wait a few hours for things to happen.
Blogdigger and Feedster are two other blog search engines that offer topic RSS feeds. With Blogdigger, simply enter your search term and the results page has a "Subscribe to this Search" orange RSS button in the top right corner. It's the same procedure in Feedster - enter your search and look out for the orange 'XML' icon in the top right corner to subscribe to that search. Kudos to both Blogdigger and Feedster for having a simple subscription process.
del.icio.us is another great tag feeds service. Unfortunately it doesn't have a search interface (surely that's the highest priority feature on its development To Do list?), nevertheless it's easy to find the tags that interest you. Simply enter e.g. http://del.icio.us/tag/allblacks into your browser (that one currently has only 1 item in it as of this date!). Alternatively, have a browse around delicious - especially the popular page - and hunt out the tags that interest you. To subscribe to a tag, look for an orange 'RSS' icon at the bottom of the page - and as usual, save it to your favourite RSS Aggregator.
If you're a Bloglines user, then there's a good tag feed service integrated into Bloglines. Look for the Bloglines search box, enter your query, then click the "Subscribe to this search" button on the results page.
Another one I've been testing is the beta MSN Search. It has a promising piece of functionality named "Search Builder", which enables you to filter results. But I have to say MSN has produced mixed results for me. My search feed for "web 2.0" has thrown up mostly old links - sometimes downright ancient in Web terms (pre 2004 Web 2.0 conference!). Maybe this has been improved in the live version of MSN Search... In any case, once again look for an orange 'RSS' button at the bottom of the results page to subscribe to a search.
Google has a recently added 'future search' feature...of sorts. It's called Google Alerts and you can find it by doing a Google News search. Look at the bottom of the results page and you'll notice a textual message like so: "New! Get the latest news on all-blacks with Google Alerts."
If you have a Gmail account, then it gives you the option of subscribing to the search via Gmail. You can subscribe to a search on news and/or the Web (why then don't they add a link to this service on Google Web search result pages?). Apparently you can use a non-Gmail email address, but you have to sign up for a Google Account. It's a neat service, but why not add RSS functionality hmm Google?
Of course let's not forget Technorati :-) They have a keyword-tracking service called "watchlists", which you can subscribe to as RSS feeds once you've signed up as a member. Technorati recently introduced tags, but they don't offer RSS feeds for them as of this date.
Those are just some of the services available for doing tag or topic searches and subscribing to them in RSS. There are others out there too, e.g. Findory (which I signed up for today).
The general pattern for all these sites is to enter a search as you normally would, then look for an orange 'RSS' or 'XML' icon (they're interchangeable in the blogging world) in either the top-right of the page or at the bottom. Click on the orange icon and save the URL to your fave RSS Aggregator. Welcome to the Age of Topic Feeds!
Here's my summary of what went on in the Web 2.0 world this past week. Headlines inspired by tabloid newspapers.
The big news of the week was Mary Hodder's scoop that Bloglines has (probably) been bought by Ask Jeeves, the genial but non-trendy search engine company. After a day or so mulling over the implications, this reporter wonders if the Martin Schwimmer episode might have spooked Bloglines into abandoning their contextual advertising strategy, in favour of quick bucks in the current RSS/blogging investment frenzy? Schwimmer certainly opened up a can of legal worms (nb: not related to ethical chickens) and perhaps Bloglines didn't want to have to deal with that. Hmmm.
Other theories are that Bloglines is selling out before Web 2.0 bullies Microsoft, Google and Yahoo crush them with their own RSS aggregators. While Bloglines has by far the most market share of the current crop of RSS Aggregators, it pales into comparison to the customer bases of the bigco's. Another reason for the sale could be that Bloglines wants to ramp up its search capabilities (but I think their current search functionality is fine). Or perhaps it's just that Mark Fletcher is one of those serial entrepreneurs who is extremely good at building new software, but once it's up and running he prefers to hand over the business development to more established companies.
[update: Om Malik suggests that Web 2.0 consolidation is happening now due to infrastructure enhancements needed to support the move from early adopter to mass market - which requires companies with "deep pockets" to fund.]
Whatever the reason, this deal has potentially big implications in the blog space - given how popular Bloglines is and that it's the only decent web-based aggregator out there (but someone will mention Onfolio or Lektora in the comments, you watch).
Breaking News! Bloglines CEO posts cat photos on his blog. More on this development as it unfolds...
In other news, Flickr is beginning to raise its profile a bit more (perhaps ramping up for its own buy-out deal, your correspondent wonders...). Richard Koman did an insightful interview with Stewart Butterfield, Flickr's head honcho. I'll write more about this in a later post, but for now here's a key quote from Stewart, when asked how long they'll be in beta for:
"There are a few more features we still want to do--printing is one of them. We need to do one more round of infrastructure enhancement. We're essentially growing it as fast as we can and we want to be able to get a few steps ahead on the infrastructure side before we can really go and say, this is it. We don't really have a date yet, maybe first half of this year."
Burnham's Beat speculates on a Google vs Yahoo "blog war". He says that SixApart and Feedburner are prime acquisition targets for Google and Yahoo, because "they will either enhance control over the distribution channel or they will reduce its costs by enabling "blog-barter" transactions".
"In an effort to extend its brand and cut out the middleman, Yahoo Finance announced that it will now receive financial data directly from the country's largest stock exchanges to publish on its site as well as to repackage and sell to other financial Web sites."
Ian Kennedy, Six Apart's Director of Sales and Partner Development, made this interesting comparision:
"...is Yahoo going to become the Amazon of Financial Data while Reuters continues to charge a premium for access to a relatively closed network of proprietary information?"
Yahoo! is certainly making some interesting moves in the RSS/blog space - even more so than Google, it has to be said. One wonders how both these Internet royalties will react to Ask Jeeves' bid to escape from its search engine servitude by purchasing the cream of the aggregator crop.
Well actually the NY Times headline was a tad more tepid: "It's Maybe a Bubble, but a Selective One", the venerable newspaper meowed. They went on to say there was "a bit of one-upmanship among analysts on Wednesday to see who could be the most upbeat about Google, which has now surpassed eBay as the Internet stock with the greatest market value."
Another exciting week in the life of Web 2.0. I hope you'll join your humble reporter for another instalment next week... sans sensationalistic headlines :-)
Mary Hodder has the scoop, which if true is huge news in the Web 2.0 world. Also quite eerie given what I wrote yesterday! Here's what Mary blogged:
"Ask Jeeves Buys Bloglines
(Updated 12:30pm. This was apparently going to be announced Tuesday, not Monday.)
That's the scoop. Ask Jeeves is integrating Bloglines into their search system (it's not yet live on their main site, til Monday as reported).
Noted however that on Ask Jeeves new blog (it's a baby, three days old!) at the top, blog search, and the sidebar, Top Blogs and Most Popular Links go straight to Bloglines.
So Mark Fletcher will be their newest employee starting Monday. Congratulations, Mark and Bloglines! Oh, and welcome to the blogosphere, Jeeves!"
RM says: so (if this gets confirmed) once again Mark Fletcher's strategy was to get bought out by a bigger company. He's getting rather good at that ;-) Obviously I will write more about this news, once more details get released.
Update 1: PaidContent.org has some excellent early analysis. e.g.
"Selling is a great way to get around the problem of a viable business model. Mark Fletcher was on the verge of phasing in a version of adwords, which may turn out to be a good way to make money from Bloglines ... but selling should have a much faster return."
And Rafat speculates that the acquisition cycle may not yet be complete: "...it certainly makes AskJeeves [a] more palatable acquisition target".
Richard Koman over at SiliconValleyWatcher gets the scoop from Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield, on whether Google will replicate Flickr's photo-sharing service (as suggested by Om Malik). Stewart is quoted as saying:
"Given our growth, the technologies cooking in the lab, and that we're still completing the feature set and infrastructure build out for version 1.0, I'm not worried about the future.
I don't think Google can or would want to simply replicate anything. They are pretty obsessive about the details -- Gmail took two years in development -- and they like to do things their own way. As their evolution from search engine to ad network + portal continues I think they become easier to compete with in areas outside their core."
And Richard Koman adds:
"It's worth noting that Om received a flood of Flickr love in response to his post, which tells you something about the value of building brand from the ground up."
Lately there's been a lot of speculation about whether the smaller Web 2.0 companies (e.g. Flickr, Bloglines, Feedburner, SixApart) will be able to foot it with the BigCo's (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon). Many people think the smaller companies will be acquired by the big co's - and this is actually a viable strategy for a smaller company - or be squashed by them. So it's refreshing to see one of the smaller company honchos come out and say: hey, we're not afraid of competing with Google.
One can't read too much into Stewart's response - it sounds pretty guarded and open-ended as to their future plans. Once they complete version 1.0, they may then be prepared to sell it to the likes of Google or Yahoo or Microsoft - who's to say? But I like that Stewart emphasizes that Flickr is best in its class in its niche, whereas Google is spreading itself over a number of niches these days. Good fighting talk ;-)
Flickr has built up a lot of whuffie, so that bottom-up market evolution may well be their saving grace when or if Google enters the photo-sharing market. And no I don't count Google's Picasa2 as being in the same ballgame as Flickr...yet.
Anybody with an interest in the publishing industry will be familiar with the dream of Print On Demand, whereby you order a book from a kiosk or similar service and a paper book is custom printed before your eyes. Former publishing honcho Jason Epstein is the person most commonly associated with this vision - he wrote a book about it (which I read last year) and recently published an essay at MIT Technology review called The Future of Books. Print on Demand is often seen as an alternative to eBooks, especially by those people unwilling to give up the aesthetic pleasure of paper books.
Well now the Print on Demand vision has crossed over to the blog world, which until now has been exclusively electronic (if you don't count 19th century pamphleteers as bloggers). A new service called blogbinders is offering to "turn your weblog into a book!" (hat-tip Andy Lark). It supports a variety of blog types, including Movable Type, LiveJournal, Typepad and Blogger.
Blogbinder's service is a 3-step process: first blogbinders has an automated service that downloads your blog content (sans HTML formatting and images), then you customize your book (including style, binding and cover work) using either a Wizard interface or self-selection, lastly you proof it and "the Blogbinders system will build a PDF file of your book exactly as it will be printed." Then it's apparently all set for printing and you can order as many copies as you want.
The pricing seems at first glance to be very reasonable. There's a small binding fee and it's then a per-page fee of 3-5 cents. One example they give is a 125 page "Perfect Bound" book, which you can get for $15.70. Even better, blogbinder seems to be gearing up to offer a "re-seller program" that will effectively let you retail your own book. Here's how they put it:
"Hey - you can even add it to your web site or blog and let your friends and readers buy your book from it! In the future, Blogbinders will be adding a re-seller program that lets you earn a royalty each time your book sells!"
Blogbinders also has plans for new features, such as ability to add comments for LiveJournal users. Will that be the start of a socially-authored book craze? It's along the same lines as what I discussed with Tim O'Reilly in my interview with him last year. A LiveJournal blog + comments as a book would be an example of mixing books with social networking. Lots of potential.
Another idea blogbinders has is to add "ability to download your content in XML or another format for re-use outside of our system (possible fee based service)". Re-using content is a big theme in the blog world, so this feature would be another win-win from this blog-paper crossover.
The Blogbinders creators have a LiveJournal blog and there's also a community discussion board. It all sounds promising and if it'll bring the social software and publishing worlds closer together, then I'm 100% for it. Incidentally, it's also a great example of a Web 2.0 service - it uses the Web as a platform for writing, ordering, customizing, printing and retailing books. End to end via the Web, yet the end product is paper-based. Sounds a little perverse, but you gotta love it!
Alf Eaton has come up with a neat little de.icio.us hack. It lists out the "speediest gatherers" for your del.icio.us page (last 100 items), based on the posting date of items. I think this means it lists out the people who linked to the same thing as you, but got there before you did. So the idea is that this list may help you find people who are interested in the same things as you, but who are faster than you at linking to them. Potentially then, this could save you the hassle of searching the Web yourself for those nuggets of information. Just wait for the fast-movers in your niche to link to them on delicious - kind of like a human version of the topic/tag/remix feeds I've been talking about. Here is my list, supplied by Alf:
| Username | Score |
| ricmac | 15 |
| notmuch | 4 |
| owen | 3 |
| fpgibson | 3 |
| magnetbox | 2 |
| mshook | 2 |
| bokardo | 2 |
| m040601 | 2 |
| zby | 2 |
| toby | 2 |
| sco | 2 |
| rpan | 2 |
| shaghaghi | 2 |
| angusf | 1 |
| toffer | 1 |
| ssoriche | 1 |
| steevc | 1 |
| dlc | 1 |
| rafaspol | 1 |
| Hybernaut | 1 |
| Glutnix | 1 |
| site9 | 1 |
| Linkorama | 1 |
| huixing | 1 |
| jkstyle | 1 |
| magallanes1234 | 1 |
| gregg | 1 |
| omit35 | 1 |
| mort | 1 |
| bobperl | 1 |
| vielmetti | 1 |
| sebpaquet | 1 |
| afongen | 1 |
| ceesaxp | 1 |
| OnTask | 1 |
| phytar | 1 |
| pc4media | 1 |
| engel5 | 1 |
| hansv | 1 |
| mymarkup | 1 |
| mediaeater | 1 |
| mattharman | 1 |
| prashantrane | 1 |
| sergee | 1 |
| RebeccaMacK | 1 |
| windalf | 1 |
| lena | 1 |
| vdm | 1 |
| TomC | 1 |
| bkerr | 1 |
| ryansking | 1 |
| crankin | 1 |
| manasgarg | 1 |
| fogfish | 1 |
| tiberus | 1 |
| Preoccupations | 1 |
| cmillward | 1 |
| fritz | 1 |
| tdw | 1 |
| bushwald | 1 |
| dblinks | 1 |
| jamesmorrison | 1 |
| kemar | 1 |
| mjs | 1 |
| kayodeok | 1 |
| nrb210 | 1 |
| 50quid | 1 |
| readwriteweb | 1 |
| joi_ito | 1 |
| tobias382 | 1 |
| rosa | 1 |
| adrian.cuthbert | 1 |
| djwudi | 1 |
| JoeLombardo | 1 |
| judell | 1 |
| jnduffie | 1 |
| litwack | 1 |
| exois | 1 |
| joaom | 1 |
| pbackx | 1 |
I think one bias to this system is that the more popular a link is, then the more people will link to it, and thus it'll likely generate a higher score on your list. There'll also be more people on your list, the more you link to popular items. On the other hand, a high score could flag a person who shares the same niche interests as you - which is what Alf's script hopes to eek out. You'll need to click through to each person to find out.
The fact that only four people scored above 2 on my list (and one of them is me!) indicates that I don't generally link to popular items. Either that, or I'm very fast on the uptake - which I know is not true!
Take a look at this list for a delicious user called acidzebra, to see the difference.
| Username | Score |
| angusf | 12 |
| kof2002 | 10 |
| notmuch | 8 |
| m040601 | 8 |
| owen | 8 |
| breyten | 6 |
| yerfatma | 6 |
| bibi | 6 |
| kohbx | 6 |
| ews | 5 |
| mshook | 5 |
| aksim | 5 |
| devzero | 5 |
| dionidium | 5 |
| casey.marshall | 5 |
| Hybernaut | 5 |
| studavis | 5 |
| ubi.quito.us | 4 |
| maxr | 4 |
| magnetbox | 4 |
| Preoccupations | 4 |
| seyd | 4 |
| payne | 4 |
| mumble | 4 |
| ravee_27 | 4 |
| marcus | 4 |
| upwind | 4 |
| spidermm | 4 |
| hrheingold | 4 |
| alexanderbecker | 4 |
| beelerspace | 4 |
| imao | 4 |
| kings | 3 |
| roberto | 3 |
| xiombarg | 3 |
| huixing | 3 |
| felipelb | 3 |
| wizzro | 3 |
| crysflame | 3 |
| shaheenb | 3 |
| spike | 3 |
| humhod | 3 |
| kevross7 | 3 |
| revgeorge | 3 |
| leinster | 3 |
| dinopixel | 3 |
| akcionar | 3 |
| paulr00001 | 3 |
| cda | 3 |
| joshua | 3 |
| jennycheuk | 3 |
| ritilan | 3 |
| bk | 3 |
| rstones | 3 |
| fncll | 3 |
| daniel | 3 |
| slackorama | 3 |
| sturob | 3 |
| kendrick | 3 |
| beatnique | 3 |
| ssoriche | 3 |
| rickduarte | 3 |
| mwiik | 3 |
| DVCBigGun | 3 |
| pepgma | 3 |
| antifuchs | 3 |
| adamhill | 3 |
| enki | 3 |
| dropshadows | 3 |
| webleon | 3 |
| breeen | 3 |
| tonetheman | 3 |
| n0wak | 3 |
| doktor | 2 |
[...plus a heap of others with score of 2 or less]
Postscript, 4/2/05: I lost the last two paragraphs of this post, because MT couldn't handle the length of it. But what I had written was that if you check out acidzebra's delicious page, you'll see that it includes a lot of items with 100+ links (the deeper the red of the highlights, the more popular an item is). So this I think accounts for the relative high scores on his Gatherers list, as well as its length.
