I'll be on holiday on the Gold Coast of Australia for the next week (YAY!) and I won't be going near a computer. I'll be back blogging in just over a week (nb: comments will be closed until then).
In the meantime, a reminder once again to contribute your Feedburner stats to the collaborative project I'm running. A lot of people have linked to this, but not enough people have posted their stats (or emailed them to me if they want to be anon). So come on peeps, if you're a Feedburner user then join us in this collaborative effort to get some decent RSS subscription statistics.
This week: Microsoft's RSS Aggregator, mobile web 2.0, open source web 2.0 (stats, adverts, topics), Structured Blogging, ETech.
Well this week has been a blur of activity for me and my server. First off I launched an RSS statistics project with Jon Udell and Feedburner, then later in the week I had fun riffing on what Microsoft was up to with start.com, their sandbox development of a web-based RSS Aggregator.
When I read the short SiliconBeat post about Microsoft's sandbox development of a web-based RSS Aggregator, I immediately blogged it and took screenshots (which became a popular attraction when Microsoft briefly pulled the site). I thought it was big news, and still do, because of what the prototype revealed - Microsoft intends to integrate an RSS Aggregator with its MSN Search product. That's important because their main rivals, Google and Yahoo, are primarily search companies.
We all knew Microsoft would eventually come out with an RSS Aggregator product, but most of us thought it would be integrated into Outlook. Well it seems that search is instead going to be the platform from which Microsoft will challenge its main rivals in the RSS war.
I updated my post about start.com 5 times during the week, so my other thoughts are there if you're interested.
Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products for Yahoo, emailed me (and others) during the week to break the news about Yahoo's new mobile RSS service. This is an extension of the My Yahoo! re-design which was launched in November. Scott said: "Basically we redesigned My Yahoo around RSS and now we brought it to the mobile world (and we have a desktop ticker too). Really all about getting whatever you want wherever you want." Interesting stuff and Russ Beattie has more details about how to actually use the mobile service.
Who else is doing mobile RSS? I've been aware of Bloglines mobile service for a while now and I've even tried to use it on my mobile phone. And I read in Susan Mernit's blog today that Google has a new mobile service. Susan says: "the deal is that Google's put up a new mobile start page with links to all their current mobile services--SMS, web and image search, imode interface."
No mention of RSS, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it introduced soon (ditto Google News).
Bit of talk about open source things in the Web 2.0 world this week. Most importantly of course, there is my open source RSS statistics effort :-) But also Jeff Jarvis has a great idea for an open source ad network. And Marc Canter has been writing inspiring stuff about Open Topics. Plus for the geekier amongst us, there are now a heap of resources for Ajax web development (how GMail and other great web apps like it were developed). My favourite resource, for its claim to handle 99% of the development work for you, is SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Bob Wyman's (of PubSub) post on what he calls "structured blogging". As he described it then: "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."
Now PubSub has come up with a new weblog called structuredblogging.org. It currently offers a WordPress plug-in to carry out structured blogging. It also has some XML schemas and further technical resources. Looks pretty interesting and I'll be following its progress. Would be great to get a Movable Type plug-in for this.
Finally, the coming week promises to be a good one for Web 2.0. The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference is being held March 14-17 and the sessions sound like Web 2.0 Geek Nirvana to me :-) What a pity I can't be there... sob! However I look forward to lots of reports from the bloggers who do attend and I sure hope Heath Row (or someone as thorough as him) will be there to transcribe the sessions. Better yet, I hope IT Conversations records them and publishes them soon after. C'mon, I'm relying on the blogosphere to be my ears and eyes for ETech - don't let me down people!
SiliconBeat has a scoop. They point to a sandbox version of a working web-based RSS Aggregator - from Microsoft! I had a very quick play-round (note it doesn't work in Firefox) and it's similar to MyYahoo, but what's most interesting is the strong integration with MSN Search. Hmmmm.
NB: On the page it states "This site is not an officially supported site. It is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy." But it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realise that a web-based RSS Aggregator with integrated search is going to seriously up the ante with Yahoo and Google. Interesting...
Update: Here's a screenshot that shows more clearly the RSS/search integration.
Update 2: The site (start.com) seems to be down now. Lucky I took those screenshots :-)
Also, thinking more about what this says about Microsoft's strategy for RSS... I think they're going to use MSN Search as the base for an RSS Aggregator, much as Yahoo uses the MyYahoo portal as the base for their RSS Aggregator. So while technically start.com may not be that impressive (it is a sandbox app remember), the business strategy behind this is significant. Microsoft are planning to integrate RSS into their search platform. Yahoo has already integrated RSS into their portal, so which direction will Google take I wonder?
Update 3: ZDNet: "Google began testing new customization features on its news aggregation site Wednesday in a salvo against competition from Microsoft." Here's the Google News beta. No RSS yet, but surely not far away. This makes my question above (which direction will Google take with RSS aggregation) even more intriguing...
Update 4: The Start.com prototype is back up now and they are inviting feedback. Also note there is a second version of the prototype - with blue colour scheme, but sans RSS. Here's a screenshot. Now I grok the name "start" - this is supposed to be a prototype portal... start page, geddit? :-)
Microsoft developer Dare Obasanjo now has more details about the project. He says: "This isn't a final product but instead is intended to show people some of the ideas we at MSN are exploring around providing a rich experience around Web-based RSS/Atom aggregation."
Update 5: The ASP.NET weblog has officially announced start.com: "The cat is out of the bag. We have been working on a new personalized start page."
A collaborative stats project using Feedburner data was
launched on this blog
yesterday. It's an informal project, but I really hope the blogosphere gets behind
it. I've even brought out the old Uncle Sam Needs You! image :-)
Basically we need: a) your Feedburner data, and/or b) your analysis. It would
also be cool if you linked to
this project in order to promote it (of course that also promotes my blog, but I see
nothing wrong with that ;-).
Thinking big... Anil Dash proposed in the comments to my post yesterday an even more ambitious project:
"...what I'd love to see is generalized stats that abstract the results from Feedburner, Technorati API, Bloglines API, Google API, and all the rest of the services in order to give me one collective number that I could use to do analysis and comparisons."
A great idea and if the current Feedburner stats collaboration works out - i.e. people in the blogosphere get involved - then perhaps what Anil suggested will be Phase 2. This could grow into a full-fledged Open Source RSS Statistics project! [ed: settle down Richard...]
Back to the present, I like how Jon Udell described our current effort:
"Typically a survey will collect your data and, maybe, show you aggregate results. The idea here is to do things in a decentralized and transparent way. Owners of data who are willing to release it post XML packets in an agreed-upon format, using an agreed-upon metadata tag. Nobody owns the aggregate data, anybody can collect and analyze it."
Amen to that. Also a big thanks to Dick and Eric from Feedburner for their help in setting this up. Their post on it is here.
I see Steve Rubel has published his Sitemeter traffic stats today. I invited him in the comments of that post to participate in our Feedburner stats project. And I'd like to extend that invitation to everyone else in the blogosphere:
1. If you use Feedburner, please consider volunteering your data (or send it to me by email if you don't want it to be public). It doesn't matter if you have 10 or 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 subscribers - all data is equally important.
2. If you don't use Feedburner, you can still contribute by analyzing the data. I'm particularly keen on getting some neat visualizations.
3. Even if you don't do either of the above, you can help by publicising this project. Blog it, baby!
As Jon said, we're not sure how this is going to turn out. I'm a bit afraid that only a few people will contribute their data. My hope of course is that loads of people participate - because the more people that get involved, the more useful the resulting RSS statistics will be.
Last week I wrote about my blog's subscription growth, inspired by Jon Udell's analysis of Bloglines Public Subscribers. In a subsequent email discussion with Jon Udell, we both wondered whether Feedburner data would show similar trends to the Bloglines data. Jon suggested a collaborative project could be launched in the blogosphere with the aim of calibrating the Bloglines data. Of course I thought this was a great idea, so I contacted Dick Costolo and Eric Lunt from Feedburner to ask if they'd be willing to help. Dick and Eric were very enthusiastic about the idea and Eric soon whipped up a couple of templates for us, accessible via RESTish URLs.
Eric came up with two new templates for Feedburner users to output their statistics in XHTML and XML.
1. The XHTML template is similar to the format Jon used in his Bloglines analysis. Here's the URL to get to it:
http://feedburner.com/fb/a/stats?id=12345&dateRangeName=
all&format=table
Note: replace the "12345" above with your Feedburner ID
2. The other template provides pure XML and you can get to it using this URL:
http://feedburner.com/fb/a/stats?id=12345&dateRangeName=
all&format=xml
You need to log in to your account to use these URLs - and don't forget to replace the "12345" bit with your own Feedburner ID. You can specify the date range too.
This is basically an alternative interface to your Feedburner statistics, for those of you who have an account there. It's a way to output your Feedburner statistics as well-formed XML, making it ripe for analysis! Here are my Feedburner stats to show you what it outputs (I'll analyze my own stats in a future post): R/WW xhtml and R/WW xml.
For the next part of this collaborative project, I'd like to ask Feedburner account holders to publish their data on the Web in one of the above formats. The idea being that those analyst pundits amongst us can combine the contributed data to get a better view of RSS subscription growth in the blogosphere.
To do this, post your data in either the XHTML or XML format to your blog - or elsewhere on the Web. Make sure you tag your post so people can find it - e.g. link to the Technorati tag feedgrowth, or tag it in del.icio.us as feedgrowth, or ping The Topic Exchange's new feedgrowth page.
Anyone can then collate all this data and do their own analysis on it. So not only are we collaboratively sharing our Feedburner data, we'll hopefully collaboratively analyze it too. I'm kind of hoping some people create cool visualizations with the data, much like folks did with Tom Coates' MT data last year. I will certainly link to you if you do, but more importantly perhaps Jon Udell will too!
btw if you do want to participate, but don't want your data to be public - you could strip out the identity details from your XHTML/XML data and email the file(s) to me at readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com. We're interested in the aggregate trends and how they compare to Bloglines data.
Finally, it should be noted that Feedburner circulation data is not quite the same as Bloglines subscription data. Circulation is "an approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours" and it can fluctuate a bit (particularly in the weekends, when circulation routinely drops). However there are potentially a lot of useful trends and insights about RSS subscription growth to be gained via this project - so I encourage you to contribute your data! :-)
Time for your weekly dose of Web 2.0. This week: Yahoo yahoo yahoo (is there an echo in here?), Wikipedia, Web 2.0 start-ups, AutoLink (I know, but bear with me...), Ruby on Rails. btw what's the best time of the week to publish this regular feature of R/WW? OK let's try Monday afternoon NZ time, which'll be Sunday evening Silicon Valley time and nearly Monday morning UK time.
If Web 2.0 was a school classroom, then Yahoo would be the teacher's pet right now. Google would be the one getting into mischief and gaining the respect of the other kids because of it. The school bully Microsoft would be sitting in the back of the class glowering and sniggering at everybody (although slightly fearful of this pushy new kid called Google). Sun Microsystems would be throwing spitballs at IBM. Flickr would be fending off advances from all the boys, while NY Times would be wondering how they ended up dating the fat kid (About.com). Amazon would have its head in the books - plotting how to gain the teacher's favour back from that dweeb Yahoo.
Anyway... Yahoo has had a big week. They released their Web Services offering, celebrated their 10th anniversary with the help of wide media coverage, hinted at a contextual advertising program, and continued to get mileage out of their Hollywood multimedia strategy. If Web 2.0 was a party, then Yahoo would be the life of it right now. And... (OK, enough metaphors!).
Also check out my analysis of Yahoo's Web Services and media Strategies.
Wikipedia made the term "Web 2.0" as official as it gets on the Web by publishing an entry on it, written by Kingsley Idehen. Kingsley has written a lot of good technical background on Web 2.0 on his blog - his writing on the subject extends back to August 2003 and is well worth checking out. It's fair to say his company OpenLink Software is positioning itself as a Web 2.0 vendor, particularly with its "universal server" product Virtuoso. Tom Bradford is the Technical Evangalist there and he also references Web 2.0 in his blog.
It's interesting to watch as companies start to position themselves in terms of Web 2.0... Verizon has a product called Mobile Web 2.0 which is a mobile phone content service - although they appear to have came up with the name before the O'Reilly conference last year. Incidentally, Yahoo has a finger in that pie too.
Expect more companies to leverage Web 2.0 this year as a catchphrase for their offerings. I think this is a good thing, so long as the term continues to broadly mean Web as Platform and it's not co-opted by any one company for their marketing.
There are a number of start-ups that are beginning to come into play, due to increased VC interest in Web 2.0 apps. For example, Sharefare Corporation described itself in a job advert as "a well funded Web 2.0 startup that has a Google sized business opportunity!".
David Galbraith's Wists is another example and it got some decent coverage in the blogosphere this week (the coverage started off as links via David's social network and soon got linked to by others in the blogosphere... that's the way to do it). Wists has been described as del.icio.us with images, but it remains to be seen if it can match the success of del.icio.us. On that note, I wonder if Joshua Schachter has had many offers for del.icio.us?? Surely he's had some money waved under his nose for it...
To be honest, I haven't been able to work up much emotion on the subject of Google's AutoLink. Not sure why, as plenty of other people have a head full of steam about it. For the pro side, read Cory Doctorow. And for the con side, read Steve Rubel. My humble opinion? I'm cautiously optimistic about Google AutoLink, because it's an example of Remix Culture innovation and it ultimately gives more power to the Web user.
Finally this week, I've noticed that Ruby (the programming language) and Ruby on Rails (the framework) is gaining some traction in the Web 2.0 world. Dave Thomas is writing a book about Ruby on Rails and he wrote this in the intro:
"Rails is the framework of choice for the new generation of Web 2.0 developers."
Certainly Rails is being used to deploy some relatively high profile social web apps: 43 Things, Evan Williams' podcasting app Odeo, the Basecamp project management app. While it seems to be still a minority programming language, it's a case of 'watch this space' for Ruby as far as building out Web 2.0 is concerned.
Update 2: After email discussions with Jon, I've discovered my figures were a bit out and so I've fixed that up now. In my updated figures, I now see evidence of what Jon pointed out in his post - i.e. a general tapering-off in new public subs added in December and February (albeit not so pronounced in my stats). Plus, if anything, the updated figures strengthen my own point about how focusing on a topic has increased my subscriber numbers.
Also I want to clarify that my chart below measures accumulative growth, whereas Jon's charts measure acceleration of growth.
Jon Udell has been analysing Bloglines Public Subscribers data and pondering its Long Tail implications. Taking Jon's lead, I looked at my own data in this way and discovered an interesting thing about the Long Tail and blogs.
As you know, I'm very focused on Web 2.0 these days. Based on a search for the term "web 2.0" within my Movable Type console, my obsession with it started in October 2004 (not coincidentally the same time that the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference was being run). I've written just under 50 posts since then which reference Web 2.0! Take a look then at my Bloglines Public Subscribers data:
click to enlarge (includes figues)
Public subscribers make up about 45% of my total Bloglines subscribers. As you can see, subscription growth for my blog took off in October 2004 and it's been steadily growing since then. [update 1: I edited this paragraph, because originally I thought Jon and I were using the same charting method. My mistake, sorry.]
I mostly attribute this to increased focus in my blog on a specific topic (Web 2.0). I think this goes to show that if you have any kind of ambitions for your blogging, your best bet is to find a niche and focus on it. That's what the Long Tail is all about - niches.
Having said that, blogging is of course many things to many people. It doesn't have to be about focusing on niches, although arguably you'll have more success if you do. Also of course the usual caveats about Web statistics apply...
Technorati Tag: blogviz
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
"Web 2.0 defines a newer incarnation of the World Wide Web typified by the transition from the typical website hosting HTML/XHTML pages, to a platform that provides a point of presence (sometimes known as a Web portal), from which any of the following interactions may occur:
1. Syndication of content using XML based formats such as RSS, RDF, Atom, and others
2. Aggregation of content published using XML based formats such as RSS, RDF, Atom, and others
3. Publishing of invocation endpoints for XML based Web services (these may be of the SOAP/WSDL/WS-* variety of RESTian XML-RPC)
4. Conventional publishing of HTML/XHTML documents
5. Exposure of WebDAV based resources and collections"
Looks like this is a brand new entry. They include a link to my blog, so I'm happy ;-)
Tomorrow, 2 March 2005, marks the 10-year anniversary of Yahoo. According to a recent AP article:
"Yahoo already has amassed an audience of 345 million, including 165 million registered users who rely on the company's Web sites for e-mail, e-commerce, news, entertainment, driving directions, matchmaking, weather forecasts, job leads and search results.
The company believes it can become an even more vital information and entertainment hub as wireless and broadband technology changes how people interact with media..."
Yahoo is mostly a new media company and their entertainment hub strategy is essentially an extension of their portal strategy - which was so successful during the 90's.
Now, almost exactly on the 10-year anniversary, Yahoo is inviting web developers to build external applications that use Yahoo's search data via APIs and Web Services. Yes, external - outside the portal.
This is of course a move that brings them up-to-date with their main search competition, Google, which has had Web Services for a couple of years now. But it's significant also because it marks probably the final stage of Yahoo's transformation from a Web 1.0 to a Web 2.0 company. Their introduction of RSS feeds last year was one of the first indications that this was happening.
In Web 1.0, Yahoo built a 'place' on the Web that attracted millions of users. It was arguably the most popular place on the Web. In Web 2.0, content is increasingly being freed from its containers. Yahoo has recognized that trend by allowing its search data to be used outside its own web portal. With the new Yahoo web services, people can use Yahoo's search data on their own websites - or in RSS feeds, or who knows where else. Yahoo data can also now be remixed to a degree (in accordance with the restrictions on the APIs).
It'll be interesting to see how this ties in with their media strategy. Yahoo still wants to drive people to its "hub" to view and interact with their entertainment and information media. Perhaps their thinking is that the search web services will help brand Yahoo even more, because people will be building Yahoo-branded applications all over the Web (or so Yahoo hopes).
This theory is backed up by their description of the new web services on their blog:
"Yahoo! Search Web Services allow you to access Yahoo content and services in your
favorite programming languages. This means you can now build Yahoo directly into your
own applications."
(my emphasis)
The more external sites Yahoo can get their content and brand onto, the more recognized and used their brand becomes in media circles - and therefore the more eyeballs they can drive to their Internet entertainment hub.
That isn't to discount the angle being touted in the first lot of publicity - i.e. Yahoo is hoping developers will create new and wonderful applications using their data. That is important too, it's just that I think Yahoo is probably more interested in how the Web Services will help drive their 'media hub' strategy.
This is my early guess anyway - based on a couple of hours browsing tonight. What do you think is Yahoo's strategy with their Search Web Services? I'm sure it's more than what I've outlined above, so feel free to leave a comment.
