This week: the future of Web sites in a world of RSS, highlights from ION RSS, new Web 2.0 developments, Techie post of the week.
Matt McAlister, VP & General Manager, Online for InfoWorld, wrote this week that RSS is disintermediating InfoWorld's Web site. In other words, RSS is eliminating the middleman - people no longer just get InfoWorld content from the InfoWorld web site. They can get it from RSS Aggregators and other sites that syndicate some or all of InfoWorld's content.
Matt thinks "RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years". He goes on to say that RSS will create more opportunities for their business, just as the Web did. However it'll be "a bit scary".
Susan Mernit put this into perspective, pointing out that for media companies like InfoWorld:
"...putting up articles on their web site just isn't enough anymore--now they need to distribute via RSS and onto multiple platforms AND have new revenue models AND figure out where their audience is going--and meet them there (Xbox, anyone?) --and they are going "Wow, so fast!"
It's true that small, niche publishers are able to adapt quicker to an RSS world. So here's a suggestion for big media - bring some of those niche publishers under your wing and leverage their position in Web 2.0. To pick a completely random example: if my blog consistently produces quality content on some of the topics that InfoWorld covers, then why not hire me as an InfoWorld freelancer? [ed: very subtle Richard!]
While we're on the topic of gently plugging my services (and I should warn you now, this ain't gonna stop until I land some more p/t jobs!), here's a quick round-up of my RSS coverage on ION RSS last week:
Here are some new Web 2.0 apps and docs I noticed this week:
Want more? Check out the Web Apps Compendium v1.0.
IBM blogger James Snell out-geeks everybody this week by comparing Web 2.0 to an FTP command (chmod 777 means to make a file writable... and yes I had to look it up). In laymens terms, James says:
People are starting to realize that the web is more than just a publishing medium. It's a place where you can (or should be able to) actually do stuff. Web sites that let you do stuff are more important than web sites that only let you read stuff.
Right on James and keep up the good work blogging at Big Blue.
That's a wrap for another week!
Google
has just released its beta book search product Google
Print (hat tip Diablo).
The new service lets people search within the text of a book. Interestingly, I note that
Amazon has a search
inside this book feature too (how long has that been live? first time I've seen it).
Both Google and Amazon searches are limited by copyright. In Google's words:
"...you'll only able to see a limited portion – in some cases only a few sentences – of books that are still under copyright. If the book has no copyright restrictions and is considered public domain, then you can browse the entire book."
I gave Google Print a test run and found the range of books I could search pretty limited.
However I came across a fascinating result when I searched for my own name "macmanus". The first search result was a book by Stephen Fox called The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. Check out the following passage and note the eerie similarities with the previous post here on my blog, about a brand association-based model for ads in RSS. The following is set in the early part of the 20th century:
'The leading advocate of advertising by atmosphere and suggestion was Theodore F. MacManus. As the star copywriter for General Motors, he produced ads specifically tailored to a particular kind of product. Cars like Buick and Cadillac were expensive items that customers bought infrequently, usually after careful planning and scrimping. So MacManus did not try to persuade his readers to go right out and buy the product. Instead, he aimed to build a durable image of reliable quality, year after year, that would send the consumer to General Motors whenever the big decision to buy was made. [...] in the same unhurried way that two people become friends, he aimed to build a friendship based on a slow accumulation of favorable impressions. "The real suggestion to convey," he insisted, "is that the man manufacturing the product is an honest man, and that the product is an honest product, to be preferred above all others."'
Looks like I may have a few things in common with Theodore MacManus, who died in 1940 btw (hence the slightly sexist language!). What he was talking about in that passage, and other sections in the Fox book, has a lot in common with my proposed solution for RSS advertising. Weird also that I even used cars as the main example in my post, without knowing anything about Theodore until today.
All of this is something I probably would never have discovered, were it not for a way to search inside a book!
nb: I had to type the above passage out, because Google prevents users from copying and pasting. Hopefully in time that sort of copyright 'fear and loathing' from print publishers will subside, as there are a world of benefits in letting Web users post extracts from books (see my interview last year with Tim O'Reilly for more on that).
Anyway, back to Google Print. It had 24 pages to show me related to the "macmanus" search in the Fox book. Amazon had 25 pages to show me for that same search, so in that respect it seems the search quality for Google and Amazon is similar.
SearchEngineWatch has more info and ZDNet has a recent story claiming that "leading academic publishers" are accusing Google of "copyright violation on an unprecedented scale".
This is an interesting development from Google and Amazon, although it's been in the works for a while. I'll have more to say on this in future posts. In the meantime, I'm off to go buy that Stephen Fox book ;-)
I have a theory about ads in RSS. It's based on my assumption that people won't click on ads in feeds enough for publishers to make much money. So I think we may be looking at the whole ads in feeds issue the wrong way. Allow me to explain...
When someone subscribes to your RSS feed, it means they want to start up an ongoing reader-writer relationship with you. They have faith in you to produce content that has ongoing value to them. They trust you and subscribing to your RSS feed is in effect a vote of loyalty. The subscriber is saying: hey, keep up the good work fella, I'm interested in what you have to say and I'll keep reading you.
If that's the case, I'm wondering if ads in RSS feeds have more value to both publishers and advertisers as a branding and marketing exercise.
So, as a blog publisher, if I'm writing quality content on the topic of cars, for example, then I want to attract advertisers for my RSS feed who are in the car business and who want my blog's content to reflect well on them. Why? Because the advertiser's image is enhanced by association with my car blog. The RSS subscribers will probably not click on the advert, but it doesn't matter because the readers will associate my car blog with the advertiser.
And I think this isn't just confined to actual subscribers either - I think over time the 'association by feed' will, by word of mouth and other viral, social methods, spread out to much more of the population that you might first think. This is Web 2.0 after all, the Social Web.
Further, there is evidence out there that the association is per post - which plays into the strengths of RSS feeds (posts are published over time). This is from an interview with Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo:
"How RSS ads should best be targeted was something else Feedburner considered in its testing. It found readers psychologically associated an ad with the individual post in which it appeared. On a site, the ad is usually considered part of the site as a whole."
Now I don't know what the technical marketing term is for this - anyone know? But the idea is that the advertiser becomes closely associated with a blog's content, because it is regularly distributed to a core group of readers who have shown loyalty to the blogger by subscribing to the RSS feed. So the reputation the blogger has, via great content or other factors, rubs off on the advertisers and that is where the value is.
If this is the case, then it also begs this question regarding programs like Google Adsense for feeds: even if ads in RSS are contextual (and I have to say so far the Google feed ads are less than satisfactory on that count), does the branding of the advertisers stand out enough for them to be closely associated with the content? If all the Google or Overture ads look the same, then is there that same 'brand by association' feel about the ads? I suspect not, which is why Google and Overture ads have click-through based revenue models.
This is just brainstorming from me... but the conclusion I'm coming to is that click-through ads are the wrong business model for RSS feeds. Further, unless Google and Overture can hook me up with advertisers that closely fit my niche and who are willing to forgo the pay-per-click model in favour of a brand-based impression model - I'm not sure I want to continue with Google ads in feeds. Particularly if all the ads have the same bland look.
What do you think?
I was intrigued by this extract from the Headshift weblog:
"The new Web 2.0 tools and services help create an ecosystem of connected people and information - as David Weinberger put it this week: The cure to information overload is more information, only it should become more ambient.
We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links."
(emphasis mine)
This reminded me of Ambient music. I used to be a bit of a Brian Eno fan - he was the guy who 'invented' Ambient music.
Time to coin a new phrase (I haven't done that in a while). Applied to RSS and blogging, Aggregator Ambience is when information envelops us but doesn't require our complete attention. We let Web 2.0 tools and services, along with our social network and serendipity, pick out the bits and pieces we want to pay attention to. It's what all RSS Aggregator developers should be aiming for, Aggregator Ambience. This is one of the strong points of Rojo btw.
Not unrelated is this discussion of the 'River of News' style of reading RSS feeds. As Dave Winer puts it: "...you just view the page of new stuff and scroll through it. It's like sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by. If you miss one, no big deal."
The Ambience and River of News metaphors appeal to me because they are laid-back, almost Zen, ways of approaching the issue of Information Overload. No more anxiety, no need to pore over every single piece of microcontent that flows through your RSS Aggregator. Just chill out and let the information wash over you like a Brian Eno record.
Ahhhhhhhh..... now, if only I could live my life that way! Hmmm, maybe I just need to go listen to some Eno music :-)
I'm on the look-out for more part-time writing, analysis or consulting work. I can't say too much about it here, but if you have any work opportunities for me - I'm available and I'd love to hear from you.
My skillset covers:
- Web and technical writing (including software specs)
- Social media analysis and research
- Web 2.0 consulting: including strategy, specs, product design, RSS and blog development, end-user documentation and marketing literature.
My niches are of course Web 2.0 and RSS. Feel free to email me at readwriteweb@gmail.com.
Rands in Repose has written the best post about web apps I've read this year. I'll pick out the highlights here and finish with some thoughts on re-inventing the page metaphor. Also you may want to check out the Web Apps Compendium v1.0, a great attempt at listing out all the main web apps on the Web today.
What is a web app? Simply defined, it's a software program that runs in a Web browser (proper definition here). What are they good for? Rands explains that there are two main advantages of web applications:
1) Zero installation and no upgrades for the user.
2) Access anywhere with an Internet connection (which Rands terms "no baggage")
The main benefits of web apps then are: they're cheap to maintain and they empower users. So why, Rands asks, "aren't they everywhere?"
Good question, but then I've met loads of developers who still think web apps are too limited in functionality, compared to desktop apps (applications you install on your PC). And that really is the main drawback of web apps - they're constrained by the limitations of the browser. But wait, Rands might say - this is where Ajax comes in.
I like Rands' concise definition of Ajax: "improved interactivity within web pages". He believes that due to Ajax, "the interface of web applications can vastly exceed your expectations." That's certainly true of Gmail and Google Maps, still the two quintessential Ajax apps.
One thing I'm wondering though: with all the current activities around synchronization for desktop apps, is that lessening the gap between desktop apps and web apps in terms of "no baggage"? When I say synchronization, I mean desktop apps that use Internet connectivity to allow users to synch their data over more than one PC or application - which solves the "access anywhere" issue for desktop apps. An example is Newsgator Online. I'd be interested in hearing some developers opinions on that...
The best part of Rands' essay, for me, was this statement:
"Stop thinking of a web application as a collection of pages.
The back button is not a bug in Ajax, it's a flaw in the browser metaphor."
This was one of the themes of the Web 2.0 for Designers article I co-wrote recently with Josh Porter. We wrote that the Web is no longer a collection of "pages", but a flow of “microcontent” units distributed over dozens of domains. Rands refers to "objects" instead of microcontent, because he's talking about web apps in a programmatic sense. I'm looking at it more from an information unit sense. But we're essentially on the same, er... page.
In summary - web apps today are aggregators, remixers, search interfaces, tagging and bookmarking apps, news services, and much more. It's all microcontent and so I have to agree with Rands and say that the back button is less relevant in web apps today. Often we don't want to go back to the previous page - we want to re-aggregate information, or re-contextualize, or do another search, or remix data, etc. In Web 2.0 we need an interaction framework that overcomes the "page" metaphor and recognizes that we're dealing in much smaller and more fluid units of information.
Jim Cuene gave an excellent presentation to the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association last week, on the subject of Web 2.0. The accompanying powerpoint presentation (3.2MB) is a nice overview of current Web 2.0 trends, delivered in a down-to-earth and businesslike way. I particularly liked Slide 3, a comparison between Web 1.0 and 2.0 entitled "Web 2.0: Evolution Towards a Read/Write Platform". Also covered in the presentation:
- Overview of common Web 2.0 apps like Flickr, del.icio.us and Wikipedia
- Introduction to blogging for a business audience
- Social Networks Connect Users into Communities of Trust (or interests)
- RSS Adoption is Small Currently, But it Could be an Attractive Tool for Niche Marketers
- Introduction to RSS and RSS Readers, using examples
- Users Who Are Using Web 2.0 Apps are Highly Engaged, Active and Attractive to Marketers
- Tactical Opportunities for Early Adopters & Marketers
Full marks to Jim for translating Web 2.0 trends and opportunities to a marketing and business-focused audience. There's also a podcast available, from Garrick Van Buren, featuring some interesting chit-chat with Jim and members of the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. However the audio from Jim's presentation itself was hard to pick up, so I didn't listen the whole way through. Still, nicely done by both Jim and Garrick and I hope others will follow their example and publish similar business-focused presentations about Web 2.0.
Bloglines creator Mark Fletcher opines: "I have over 200 subscriptions in my Bloglines account [...] There's no way I could follow that many sites in My Yahoogle. Sometimes I'm asked if I consider My Yahoogle competition. There's no way that they can compete without completely changing their interface."
He's talking about both My Yahoo and Google's new Personalized Homepage - and he has a point. While I've talked about Google and Yahoo (and Microsoft) as being future RSS Aggregators, the fact is they *will* need to change their interfaces to scale up the amount of RSS feeds their users can track. I think Google and Microsoft, in particular, will utilize search heavily in whatever new interfaces they come up with.
Indeed Mark Fletcher himself recently said that Bloglines is aiming to develop a "world-class blog search, which we don't think exists now" [nb: see my analysis on Bloglines and search from a couple of months ago].
My prediction? Look for Google and Microsoft to integrate RSS and search much more closely than they do today. MyYahoo may be different, as their focus is primarily media. They may instead ramp up their RSS aggregation features to enable their users to subscribe to more feeds - and more variety too (think video, podcasts, weather, stocks, etc).
Meanwhile, a Web-based RSS Aggregator to keep an eye on is Rojo. A confession: I've been using Rojo for the past week as my main RSS Reader. I've hardly touched Bloglines! OK that's been for testing purposes, but I'm not that far away from making a permanent switch to Rojo. The only thing holding me back is performance issues (more on that in a minute).
I'll do a thorough review in due course, but for now let me say that I find it easier to scan information in Rojo and it has features such as 'Flag this post' that are proving to be quite useful. In general, I'm finding the Rojo interface suits my feed-reading habits and Rojo adds useful (and promising!) functionality to the mix. And I'm not even talking about tagging!
However the main issue with Rojo right now is quite simple: performance. It desparately needs to improve the download times, which can be painfully slow, and there are a number of little bugs that need to be wiped out. But I know the Rojo team is aware of those issues and it's their number 1 priority to address them. It has to be, otherwise all the promise of Rojo will slip away like a dot com dream.
My opinion of using Rojo after 1 week is this: a very nice interface which makes for a fulfilling feed-reading experience, some useful and promising information management features (which I'll elaborate on in a later post) - but it seriously needs to address the performance issues and make everything run fast and flawless.
So Bloglines - it's your move! Bloglines to my mind still holds the advantage in site performace and fast updates for feeds. And simplicity, although only just - I've found Rojo to be easy to use too. What Bloglines needs to work on, as I mentioned last week, is the Bloglines User Interface. Get rid of the two panes, for a start. I've found the one-pane view in Rojo much more satisfying. And let's see some fresh new User Interface features and a ramped-up search.
Mark Fletcher promised in my blog that improvements are on the way, which is great news. Knowing how smart Fletcher and his team are, I'm fully expecting some compelling new functionality - maybe an interface to easily track non-blog information such as weather and shipments, for example?
In any case I'd advise Bloglines not to delay those upgrades for too long, because some of us Bloglines lovers have begun to seriously eye up the compeition ;-)
This week: Summary of Google Factory Tour, Recruitment 2.0, Rollups, Techie post of the week, Web 1.0 Summit.
The Factory Tour and accompanying webcast received tons of coverage this week, so I won't re-hash all the details. I'll simply summarise the new things and add my comments. New? Google Personalized Homepage, Google Earth (a satellite mapping service), AdSense for Feeds, language translations.
My initial take on the Personalized Homepage was that Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning their portal products into RSS Aggregators. Of course these products will end up being much more than simple RSS aggregation tools - they'll integrate search, news, media, email and lots of other thing into the mix. But RSS is in a sense the key to a successful portal in Web 2.0. RSS enables users to subscribe to searches, news, blogs, weather, stocks, etc. In fact most of the elements that make up a portal can be subscribed to using RSS. That's what I meant when I said the Big 3 are turning their portals into RSS Aggregators.
Other views: Om Malik wrote a witty account of the Factory Tour itself. Marc Canter puts it into perspective of DLA trends, making the case for Google and others to support a "web of islands, meshed together by open standards".
Great post about how Web 2.0 is impacting the recruitment industry. It was written by a blogger from Indeed.com, which is a "search engine for jobs" that uses RSS feeds to deliver search results. According to the post, there are 3 key aspects to a Web 2.0 recruitment service:
1. Open Distribution (using RSS)
2. Open Communication (using blogs)
3. Open & Flexible Pricing - which means using "Pay-per-click search engine advertising" to source job candidates.
A 'rollup', in VC language, appears to be a synonym for consolidation. A site called VC Experts defines it as when an organization "acquires a series of companies in the same or complementary fields, with the goal of becoming a dominant regional or nationwide player in that industry."
A good example of a rollup occured this week when RSS aggregation firm Newsgator acquired Feed Demon, a smaller niche RSS Aggregator. VC Fred Wilson said that Newsgator's "venture rollup" is "a smart play because the big guys have figured out how important RSS is and are coming after the early entrants." Rafat Ali from PaidContent.org followed up with some more reasoning behind Newsgator's purchase:
"...what is increasingly becoming important is how do metrics get reported, how does optimization happen on the backend, how well do you inter-operate with other newsreaders in the universe, etc."
My take: Newsgator is promoting itself as a "platform" these days and the range of their product line (from personal to business to enterprise, and from desktop to email to web) indicates their ambitions in the RSS market. But it's interesting to note that most of their product line, including Feed Demon, is based on the Windows platform. So it wouldn't surprise me if a bigger platform - i.e. Microsoft - swallows their smaller platform in the not too distant future.
Fellow kiwi Phil Pearson gets honoured with my prestigious Techie Post of the Week, with his excellent summary of recent structured blogging developments. Phil defines structured blogging as an "ongoing effort to make weblog content along specific lines machine readable and aggregable." I recommend you go read it - I don't award my Techie Post of the Week to just anybody you know... :-)
Finally this week, a recent funny thread about Web 1.0 made me chuckle. It started off as a witty Flickr post about a fictional "Web 1.0 Summit". The comments are priceless, e.g.:
"There are places where Web 1.0 is appropriate and flashy stuff is not and vice versa, but mostly the former."
"Anyone else going to the blink tag session?"
"...we have a few slots left in the "Green Text on Black background" breakout session."
"OMG! I hope I'm not too late to start a business based on this. . ."
That's a wrap for another week!
I've been approved as one of the beta testers for Google's new AdSense for RSS feeds. So I'm going to be running Google ads in my feed for a few weeks at least - purely for research purposes of course ;-)
Now before you get all righteous on me, remember this is a test. If the ads aren't contextual enough, or they detract from my writing, or readers threaten me with bodily harm - then I'll take the ads away.
But as I've stated before, essentially RSS feeds are no different from HTML webpages in this Web 2.0 world. RSS and HTML are the primary means of publishing and viewing content on the Web today. Indeed, RSS is arguably more important than HTML nowadays, especially for blogs. So if I put ads on my website (which I do), why not put them in my RSS feed too?
The other thing is that it's an incentive for publishers to use a full-text RSS feed. I've always done that anyway, because of what I outlined above - RSS is (what I call) a "first-class citizen" of content publishing. However a lot of people still publish excerpted feeds and so ads may be the tipping point for full-text feeds.
That's all the theory anyway, let's see how it pans out. I'm very interested to see how contextual the ads are, given this is a topic-focused blog. I'm interested in how readers react to the ads. And of course I'm keen to see if I make more than coffee money from them. Feel free to email or leave comments if you have feedback about the ads.
