ReadWriteWeb

A couple of weeks ago OJR reported that Yahoo News - "the second most trafficked News & Information site on the Web" - was in the process of a re-design. That design has now gone live in beta form, with the tagline "More News. More Relevant. More About You."

From a design pov:
- They've toned down the blue colour of the links.
- News sources are now highlighted more - AP will be pleased, as they're gung-ho on branding their content.
- Tabs are now used for the section menu, enabling them to go from 3 columns to 2 and so free up white space.

[nb just as I finish that last sentence, Yahoo has flicked the switch and made the new design live on http://news.yahoo.com].

The things I like the best though are the increased focus on RSS and search, and the integration with My Yahoo. From the intro page:

Not only does the new design allow users to subscribe to non-traditional news sources, but the "dive deeper into topics" buttons are a fantastic example of topic search n' subscribe applied to a major media website. Congrats to the Yahoo News team! I know that I have some Yahoo staff subscribed to my blog, so perhaps my RSS and Topic-based Search evangelism is paying off in some small way :-)

p.s. Google, please sit up and take notice - instead of spending your time rejecting fantastic news sources.

A daily shot of Web 2.0 news. Each item will have a main link, one or two lines of commentary from me, and views of the story from other bloggers (if available and if I have time). I'm still fiddling with the format...

BBC unveils five-year mobile strategy

NMA reports on the BBC's five-year strategy for mobile: "The strategy is centred around mobile browsing, establishing the mobile version of bbc.co.uk as important to the Corporation as the main Web site, moving to both richer on-demand and user-generated content." (via PaidContent.org)

My comment: This is the first time I've seen a major media corporation put mobile offerings on a par with its website.

Return of old Web business models

Andrew Madden in MIT Tech Review reviews some Web 1.0 business plans that have re-emerged successfully in Web 2.0. He cites online groceries and "the 'verticalization' of search and locally targeted online ad models."

Views:
- alarm:clock follows up: "One of the more striking aspects of the Web 2.0 is the familiarity of its business models - we've seen many of them before. Some of the early models died off with good reason, but others needed time to ripen."

My comment: Perhaps the difference this time round is that the underlying technologies (broadband, web services, browsers, etc) are now mature enough to support the Web as a business platform. Time to dust off that e-commerce-wap-portal business plan from 1999!

Internet TV is Open and Independent

Participatory Culture Foundation: "Announcing a new platform for internet television and video. Anyone can broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost, using BitTorrent technology."

My comment: Sounds like a mix between Our Media and TiVo - they're building a "desktop video player application" and a "video publishing tool". Yet another sign that the Internet is where media will roam free in the 21st century.

A daily shot of news from your favourite Web 2.0 blog. Each item has a main link, one or two lines of R/WW commentary, plus views of the story from other bloggers.

Start-up building on top of Firefox

ZDNet reports that a company called Round Two is building "a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience."

Views: 
Slashdot: "...they are offering extension support and bundling for corporations which want to adopt Firefox"
Round Two website - doesn't have any products yet, but they're sponsoring a number of Firefox extensions and add-ons.

My comment:  
This is a great example of using the Web as a platform for business. It's been said before that Open Source provides opportunities for new businesses to bundle OS products into user-friendly packages, along with providing support. This looks like such a play - and they'll add new products to the mix too.

Venture Capitalists Bullish

AP reports: "Venture capitalists ended 2004 on their most profitable run since the dot-com bust, continuing a gradual recovery that has coincided with the stock market's renewed interest in young companies."

My comment:  
If VCs are happy, then we're all happy :-) There don't seem to be as many IPOs these days though - start-ups are more interested in getting bought by a bigco. A sign of a more risk-averse Internet climate nowadays?

Volvo Sponsors MSN Spaces

According to the press release, Volvo partnered with Microsoft's blogging service "to reach users who are engaged in telling the stories of their lives, mirroring the "Volvo for life" brand campaign."

Views:
Andy Lark comments: "Maybe that's a reason not to use MSN Spaces - the fact you don't get to choose who is advertising in your personal space."
Steve Rubel sees "three distinct groups of blog advertisers forming".

My comment:  
MS and Volvo think these adverts on MSN Spaces will "add value to consumer's experience". Hmmmm. Well I guess it's better than all those pop-up ads we used to get in the Tripod days ;-)

Other Web 2.0 Links Today

The Aggregation Kool-Aid - points out that aggregation is only part of the solution; relevance/matching are the key problems to solve.

Is the Internet Under-Hyped? - sure, we can always use more exaggeration and overstatement...

Yahoo! News Adds Custom RSS Feeds - this was from last week, but I didn't mention it at the time. Yahoo one-ups Google News (which has email notifications, but it's not the same).

Google top home for blogs - Google's Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com and Xanga.com lead the blog authoring tool market. MSN is about to crash the party though, driving their fancy volvos no doubt.

Here's a new feature I'm trialing on Read/Write Web. It'll be a daily shot of Web 2.0 news. Each item will have a main link, one or two lines of commentary from me, and views of the story from other bloggers (if I have time).

It'll take a while to settle into a decent format, so bear with me while I experiment with this.

Why the coffee picture? Well I'm hoping this feature becomes like a morning fix of caffiene for my US readers, as I'll be publishing it in time for breakfast over there. For my non-US readers, maybe it can be a mid-afternoon Diet Coke or evening Hot Chocolate :-)

Become.Com Goes Live 

They claim to have the Web's "Largest Search Engine For U.S. Shopping Information". 

Key quote from CEO Michael Yang: "This shows the ability of our vertical search strategy to produce the first disruptive technology in internet search since Google"

Views: Susan Mernit is curious about revenue and customer acquisition models. The Internet Stock Blog compares Become.com with Shopping.com (and others).

My comment: who knew spell check was such a crucial feature? (ref the press release) 

AP challenges Google News

MarketWatch: "...the Associated Press is "concerned" about its material being distributed through Google and other news aggregators" and is "trying to persuade Google to buy a license".

Views: Here's the original story from LA Times, who frame it as Google vs Yahoo (the latter pays license fees for their content). Threadwatch notes that whatever the outcome, it will set a legal precedent. PaidContent says "this [Content Providers looking for payments] will probably become a trend."

My comment: On one hand, as a Content Provider myself, of course I'm backing AP. On the other hand, long-term I think AP (as a bigco content provider) is better off trying to build their own aggregation and syndication services, rather than worrying too much about other aggregators.

del.icio.us funding round

Joshua Schachter, creator of the popular social bookmarks tool del.icio.us, announced an investment by a group including Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, Tim O'Reilly. Joshua says it's "a minority stake, which will keep me in control of the future of del.icio.us."

Views: Niall Kennedy, softechvc, Om Malik (who thinks the funding was "less than $2 million"), PaidContent (which notes of the investors: "Several already back or have backed tagging enterprises").

My comment: This has been heavily linked to today, so chances are it's not new news for you. Let me just add that I still think one of the big companies will buy out del.icio.us at some point, probably before the year is out. Who can resist becoming a dot com millionaire? ;-) My money's on Yahoo...

Bonus Link (froth on the top)

Excellent post by Chris Anderson detailing mainstream media meltdown: music, tv, radio, newspapers, magazines, books were all down in sales last year. Movies, video games and the Web were all up.

I'm pleased to announce the first Read/Write Web sponsor: ThePort Network. They will be sponsoring my Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up for the next 3 months, which I'm thrilled about! ThePort Network has an exciting Web 2.0 product that is currently in the process of being launched. I've had a walk-through of it and I was very impressed!

In other news, tomorrow morning I'll be launching a new feature on Read/Write Web which I think you'll enjoy. I'm also running on a stricter publishing timetable now. I'm aiming to publish all my Web 2.0 news and views posts to coincide with breakfast time in the United States (where most of readers come from, I think). This generally means publishing at 10-11pm New Zealand time so as to catch the early bird on that same day in the States - in a sense I'm a day ahead of most of you ;-)

One last thing for now. I'm still looking for sponsors for the rest of Read/Write Web (including the new feature I'm about to launch). So feel free to email me if you'd like to know more.

This week: non-blog uses for RSS (including Enterprise and Consumer), a new web-based delivery system for Associated Press, RSS advertising, Bigco action, Bloglines vs Technorati.

RSS not only for blogs

Right now there's a lot of activity around utilising RSS outside blogging. I've said before that blogging is and always will be a minority activity, so it's good to see that RSS is branching out. Rok Hrastnik had a nice post during the week which outlined alternative marketing uses for RSS. Some highlights:

- enable customers to track book releases

- deliver savings coupons and related information to customers

- deliver software product updates and patches, as they become available

- as a sales and accounting tool; e.g. Rok reported that "One company uses RSS as a consulting billing awareness tool. The consultants create activity reports and the RSS feeds from the activity channels carry the billable information to the accounting staff for invoice preparation."

- deliver categorized product releases - Rok calls this "living digital catalogues". An example of this can be seen with Yahoo's Shopping feeds.

Those are just some of the things Rok highlighted, from a marketing perspective. 

My view: I think we'll also see RSS feeds begin to be utilised within the Enterprise. Newsgator is one of the vendors leading the charge in this space and to quote from their NewsGator Enterprise page:

Integration with existing enterprise technologies is going to be key in this, because of the amount of money already invested in them (CMS, collaboration, etc). 

We're also beginning to see consumer applications that enable tracking of non-blog information. For example Bloglines can now "track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world's largest parcel shipping companies - FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service". They're promising to track "neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking" in the near future.

Initiatives involving structuring or extending RSS will further push non-blog uses of RSS in the coming months.

New AP delivery app

Associated Press is one of the most interesting media companies when it comes to Web 2.0 technologies. Their CEO Tom Curley is a visionary IMO. Recently he announced that AP "will begin offering a new delivery system to members of the not-for-profit news cooperative" in order to deliver content "digitally across all platforms - text, photos, graphics, audio and video." The new system will be a web-based interface with search functionality and customized reports.

Media analyst John Blossom is slightly skeptical, because he says there isn't a lot of wiggle room in being a "middle man" in the content industry (I'm paraphrasing John). He notes that:

The upshot is that distribution and personalization are key in todays media landscape. My take is that if AP can provide the right interfaces to the content delivery systems (using custom search, filtering, aggregation, etc) then they'll be in a strong position. I think this is what Curley is banking on: that AP's web-based interfaces - which will eventually be integrated with members' computer systems - and ability to customize content to their members' needs, will allow them to keep one step ahead of a) RSS feeds that come direct from the sources, and b) the likes of Google News. 

RSS advertising 

Some talk again this week of RSS advertising. VC Fred Wilson did some experimenting with his Feedburner account and based on that Dave Morgan declared:

Advertising within an RSS feed is a sensitive issue and it's a case of softly softly for publishers, but I do think we're turning a corner. I too was given a trial of the new Feedburner Pro service, although I wasn't brave enough to turn on the RSS advertising :-). What I've noticed so far is that there are far more RSS "views" than webpage views - although I'm reluctant to publish the numbers because I think the margin of error is too large at this stage. 

It's still early days, but I think you'll begin to see more cases of advertising within RSS feeds as people start to accept that in Web 2.0 feeds are no different from webpages - in terms of being an interface to content. RSS feeds will be held to a stricter account by users though, because they are an opt-in service. So people are entitled to expect that advertising is consistently contextually relevant and doesn't distract from the content. 

A side benefit of RSS advertising, when it arrives en masse, is that it'll help promote full-content RSS feeds. I generally prefer full-content feeds, but currently a lot of publishers use excerpted feeds in order to get click-throughs to their advertising-supported webpages. That business model is ripe for overhaul.

Bigco action

Selected bits that caught my attention from the big companies this week:

- Yahoo/wikipedia deal: gives Wikipedia increased exposure, via Yahoo's millions of users. Also gives Yahoo even more whuffie from the tech community... although I detected a slight Whuffie/Mojo Backlash from certain quarters. 

- Google Launches Q&A Service: the Rise of the Answer Engines perhaps? 

- Microsoft Connected Services Framework: "a flexible and customizable solution that uses a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to help companies streamline the creation, management, and delivery of content".

Argh, corporate speak! I prefered the headline at InternetNews: Web Services, Hollywood Style. Much sexier. Here is the low-down from InternetNews about what it does:

Microsoft is formally launching it next week at the 2005 National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas.

Post of the week: Bloglines v Technorati

Umair Haque at Bubblegum Generation wrote a thought-provoking post comparing the strategies of uber-Web 2.0 companies Bloglines and Technorati. Basically Umair reckons Bloglines got it right, while Technorati's strategy fell short. He contends that the "dominant" strategy for RSS Aggregators is:

He gets to the meat of his point here (I've chopped it a bit):

Steve Gillmor would label this attention, but whatever you call it Umair has provided an interesting analysis of it. And I loved the bit about RSS Aggregators being 'browser 2.0'. A bit corny perhaps, but it's a nice analogy for how RSS is changing the Web.

This is my final post on the JupiterResearch report entitled RSS Readers: Addressing Market Opportunities with an Innovative News Medium (here are Part 1 and Part 2). I've enjoyed this chance to analyse the analysts and I'm keen to do it again. I wonder if other Analyst companies would be willing to do a similar thing?

So in Part 1 I reviewed how the RSS Readers report explained what RSS is and in Part 2 I talked about the statistics. It only remains for me to look at JupiterResearch's recommendations and Key Finding.

Application RSS Integration Will Spur Adoption, but Uptake Will Be Hindered by Conflicting Formats

That's the header for the final passage of this report. They start off with the statement:

By "mainstream applications", they mean Microsoft's Longhorn - which is "expected to include a desktop-based RSS reader" - and free browsers such as Firefox. According to the report, this spells bad news for small vendors: 

This reminds me a post that Bob Wyman of PubSub wrote recently. He voiced similar concerns, particularly about Microsoft. Bob Wyman wrote:

I suspect that PubSub would count as one of the "small vendors" that JupiterResearch refers to, even though they're more than a simple RSS Newsreader. Perhaps PubSub, and other products like it, will be able to differentiate enough... or perhaps not. It depends on what the 100-pound gorilla decides to do. Either way JupiterResearch's warning to small vendors is well justified. 

Excerpted RSS Feeds

The report then turns its attention to Content Providers and recommends that "content sites should give away only what they need to in order to drive traffic to the site." In other words, publish excerpted feeds and not full content feeds. Jupiter's position is that RSS feeds are a complement to the web site. 

Of course I think that is a decidedly Web 1.0 view of the world. In Web 2.0 the RSS feed is more likely to be where the value proposition is, rather than the website. This will be especially so when RSS goes mainstream, but I think we're beginning to see this even now. Admittedly the audience of this report is marketing and business folk, who still think the Web world revolves around the website. And perhaps it still does from a B2C perspective, at least until RSS use increases well past the 12% figure that was given earlier in the report (see Part 2 of my analysis). 

Nevertheless I would've liked to see JupiterResearch try and educate people about the (future) value of the feed - and that it is increasingly replacing the site as the point of content consumption for users. My point here is that in Web 2.0, RSS feeds are not only a means of leading people to your website. RSS feeds in many cases will usurp the website.

Plus there are downsides to excerpted feeds that weren't covered in the report - for example it's less convenient and more time-consuming for your readers, because they have to open a new browser window and wait for images to load etc. That's not to say that full-content feeds would necessarily be better than excerpted ones for business people reading this report, but driving traffic to a website may be just one of a number of goals for Content Producers. Another goal could be to ensure as many people read your content as possible, in which case I'd recommend full-content feeds.

RSS Formats

The last paragraph of the report focused on that old chestnut of conflicting RSS formats. The RSS War - that's, like, so 2002/03 for us web geeks. But of course for non-geeks, it's still an important issue. So I understand why JupiterResearch included it. They write:

Once again Microsoft is cast as the Big Bad Wolf, because the report warns that they or another large player could "usurp control of the standard and push the industry into a proprietary variant of RSS."

I agree this is a risk, but frankly there is very little chance that vendors will "come together" over RSS and sing John Lennon songs around a Foo Camp fire. Some of them don't even get invited to Foo Camp! :-) RSS 2.0 is now entrenched as the main RSS format, but there will always be Content Producers that use RSS 1.0 for its metadata qualities (government departments for example) and there will be more and more Content Producers that utilise the new tricks Atom has up its sleeves. Vendors of RSS Newsreaders have to accommodate all of those people, so they'll continue to support all the main formats.

Key Findings

Back to the front page and the Key Finding. It's probably most illuminating if I paste all the text:

It's pretty clear then that RSS is still in early adopter phase, as only 12% of online consumers use RSS feeds according to this report. But the last sentence hints that we are entering a stage where mainstream users are being introduced to RSS feeds. So the report recommends to evangalize the benefits of RSS to new people.

This report covered the main aspects of evangalism: touting RSS as an alternative to email and web surfing, encouraging easy set up and subscription to feeds (e.g. lose the orange XML button), use excerpted feeds to drive traffic to the web site, and agree on the RSS 2.0 standard. I don't agree with all of those things, but for mainstream people it's solid - if a little conservative - advice. 

Personally I would've liked the report to be a bit bolder and outline some of the emerging benefits of RSS, in the Web 2.0 world we're in now. For example: using RSS you can track topics, personal information, business data and events (among other things). 

But I guess it's up to bloggers like me to do that kind of evangalizing! ;-)

The Wikipedia page for Web 2.0 continues to evolve. It still doesn't read well in places, but some parts hit the mark. For example this is a pretty good explanation of the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0:

I don't think I've ever heard the term "Web 1.5" before, but nevermind... I still think the 'Business Impact' section of the Wikipedia definition needs a lot of work and I'm not sure the explanation of how Web 2.0 relates to the Semantic Web is quite right yet.

If I may give you the Crude Version of how I define Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web. Web 2.0 is 'The Web as Platform' and the Semantic Web is 'The Web of Meaning'. That's boiling it down to its essence, in order to make the point that they are two different concepts. I don't necessarily see Web 2.0 as an evolutionary stage towards the xanadu that is the Semantic Web (to mix my Web metaphors). There is a relationship there, don't get me wrong, but it needs to be fleshed out some more.

On this subject, this week I finished co-authoring an article for Digital Web Magazine about how Web 2.0 impacts the field of web design. I co-wrote it with Joshua Porter and hopefully it'll be published soon.

Once the Digital Web article comes out, I may have a go at editing the Wikipedia. I think we're getting closer to pinning down the definition of Web 2.0 - as always on the Web, it's being bootstrapped by the community as we go along :-)

p.s. I wish the Wikipedia had RSS feeds so we can easily track changes to pages!

Last week I started my review of a JupiterResearch report entitled RSS Readers: Addressing Market Opportunities with an Innovative News Medium. I covered the first couple of pages of the report, in which JupiterResearch asked: What Is RSS and Where Is It Used? I was interested to see what Michael Gartenberg from JupiterResearch, the Lead Analyst on this report, would say in response to my initial post. Apart from calling me Roger throughout ("Roger was a little perturbed..."), he did address my concern about whether the report was dismissive about weblogs:

Fair enough. And yes Michael did quickly fix up the "Roger" faux pas :-)

Frequency

So to the next part of the report. Page 3 had a chart and some analysis with the heading 'Market for RSS Newsreaders Equal in the Home and Business'. The question asked of respondents was: "Which of the following applications installed on your primary home or work computer do you use monthly or more frequently?". The options given were: Search toolbar, desktop search app, RSS newsreader app, RSS newsreader service, and "None".

Both types of RSS newsreaders had the same figures - 5% of respondents used them at work and 6% at home. I found it interesting that the same percentage of respondents used desktop RSS newsreaders and web-based newsreaders - this is worth tracking in the coming months and years. Will one of desktop or web-based start to pull ahead? My money's on web-based, but valid arguments can be made either way.

Back to the report... the use of RSS newsreaders paled into comparison with the search toolbar (62% home, 27% work). So all in all, RSS newsreaders in both desktop and web variety are still very much a minority tool - 12% of consumers use a variety of RSS newsreader, according to this report. But JupiterResearch notes:

While this rings true, I couldn't see any evidence to back it up. How do they know the market is growing and that there is "increased awareness"?

Demographics

Turning now to page 4, where the report analyzes the demographic profile of RSS users. Here the demographics of RSS Users is compared to those of Online users. We find out that the female to male ratio is higher for RSS Users - 55% are female, 45% are male. It's 51% female, 50% male for Online users (I presume the extra 1% is due to rounding). So that is a surprise, especially given all the recent talk about the lack of attention for female bloggers.

For the age demographics, more 18-24 year olds use RSS (23% compared to a 14% representation online). But 35+ is still the number 1 age group both with RSS users and online (56% are RSS users, compared to 64% online). 25-34 years are 22% in both RSS and online averages. JupiterResearch notes that:

I take this to mean that no specific age group can be targeted at the expense of the others. But the question remains: does each age group have different uses for RSS newsreaders? For example, it's well known that LiveJournal is extremely popular amongst young people and it's mainly used as a social tool. Whereas older people (and I include myself in this, even though I fit in the middle demographic right now) are more likely to use RSS newsreaders to keep up with news and business. The JupiterResearch report doesn't address any of those issues, but I suspect marketers would want to find out about it.

Page 4 also refers to income and Net experience, and broadband vs dial-up. RSS users are slightly richer and more have broadband (41% have broadband, compared to 33% online avg). Somewhat surprising is the Net experience figures, which show that more "newbies" and "intermediates" use RSS than the online average (25% for RSS users, compared to 17% online average).

JupiterResearch finishes page 4 with this comment:

That's followed by advice to ditch the orange 'XML' button - which every RSS techie knows we have to do... we just don't know what to replace it with, apart from multiple vendor buttons.

Summary

I'll leave the report summary and recommendations for my final post in this series, which I hope to have done by end of this week. In the meantime, feel free to comment below on what you think it all means.

The second in my JupiterResearch blogging series is coming up later today, but I thought I'd mention my new sponsorship drive in the meantime. Basically I've set myself a goal of being self-employed in blogging-related activities by the end of this year. This will primarily be from writing (not just on R/WW), but also probably consulting and software design.

My strength though is writing - and thoughtful, analytical writing at that. Exemplified (I hope) by all the hard work I've been putting into R/WW over the past 6 months.

Up To 25% From R/WW

So to get me kick-started on my self-employment goal I'd like to try and earn some money from Read/Write Web - perhaps up to 25% of what I need to go full-time with blogging activities, perhaps less. I doubt it'd be much more than that.

For R/WW sponsors or advertisers, I am particularly targeting Web 2.0-style companies who want to reach influential, smart, decision-making people. And yes my dear readers, you can take that as a compliment ;-)

I have a couple of things in mind:

1) Obtaining a sponsor specifically for the Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up. This would involve a banner at the top of each Wrap-Up article and perhaps a "proudly brought to you by..." mention. Nothing inside the editorial though.

2) Permanant sponsor banners in the right-hand gutter. NB I may need to think about re-designing my blog, as the 3-column design can be restrictive.

Any thoughts about all this? Feel free to let me know in the comments below. Plus of course if you'd like to be a sponsor, send me an email :-)