Jeremy Keith has
developed a web app called Adactio
Elsewhere, which uses APIs to collect scattered pieces of Web content into one place.
It's a nice idea and one that Erik Benson was
exploring not so long ago. Erik ended up piping all his content pieces through to his
weblog via the Bloglines API.
Jeremy built his app using Ajax (what else) and currently he's got Flickr, del.icio.us, Amazon and Upcoming in there. He's also included an RSS Reader, which runs off his OPML file - although I wonder whether he can use the Bloglines API for this, for added functionality? It would also be great to see 43Things added, as it has an API.
With sites like 43Things and Yahoo360 (and Flickr for that matter), I simply don't have time to visit them as much as I'd like to. Having everything in one place would potentially make me use services like 43Things and Yahoo360 more often. Another reason why adding an API is almost essential for social software services these days.
I'm trying again with a branded daily update of Web 2.0 news and
views. Not content with cornering the "Web 2.0" niche in blogs, I'm now making a play
for the term "2.0" ;-) Let me know what you think of the new format.
Popular Web Design firm 37signals has announced a new email-to-web product. They're promoting it as a kind of Web 2.0 makeover to "the star of Web 1.0" - email. So what does Backpack do? Apparently it will receive an email and "turn it into something useful on the web" - in other words, it'll transform an email into a functional web page.
I have to admit, this sounds really cool and something I can picture myself using. Practically speaking, I already use Gmail as a 'To Do List' and to keep track of projects I'm involved in. Gmail's ability to label emails and search them, together with a highly interactive interface and huge storage, has turned out to be of immense use to me.
Hmmm. I'm not sure at this stage whether Backpack would be a competitor to Gmail, or a complimentary product?
PCMag.com has screenshots of Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation Windows (via waxy.org's fabulous linkblog). Of most interest to Web 2.0 fans will be how they've integrated the browser and search, the two core Web interfaces. The final screenshot shows Internet Explorer and to be honest the only real difference I noticed was a search bar in the top-right - presumably the same search that will be integrated into the core Longhorn OS. That's potentially a threat to Google of course (no surprises there).
NewScientist reports that Google plans to "dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms." What worries me is that most of the values to be measured are suspiciously quantity-based: e.g. number of stories, average story length, number with bylines, number bureaux cited, how long they have been in business, number of staff, volume of internet traffic.
Um hello - what about niche sites and bloggers?
Geodog gets misty-eyed about pre-Web 2.0, before the hype and money.
Counterpoint to the Adaptive Path article. For me, the great thing about Web 2.0 is how many great ideas are being executed. A financially healthy environment begets more of those ideas - don't you think?
This week: Google turns up the heat, Yahoo burns to be a media bigco, Microsoft's 64-bit light at the end of the tunnel, blogging media empires warm their hands by the advertising fire, Craigslist - GoogleMaps make a combustible combo.
In the Mojo Cold War, Yahoo took the initiative from Google at the start of 2005 and the propaganda machine has been in full force since then (backed up by solid products, it has to be said!). This week Google released two major updates to their online advertising services, which account for 97% of Google's revenue. This no doubt launched a rocket up Yahoo!
i) Firstly Google gave advertisers more control over their ads. Advertisers can now select which sites get to carry their ads (Google calls this "site targeting") and advertisers can make better use of graphics. Some punters took the latter to mean Google is becoming a banner advertising company. Google is also introducing an auction-style system for determining what advertisers pay to have their ads shown.
While the changes obviously benefit advertisers the most, small niche-focused Web publishers may find it increases their revenue too. Probably the group with the most to lose is big publishing and media companies, because advertisers can now bypass the bigco sales reps and buy site-specific adverts direct from Google.
ii) The second big Adsense news of the week was that some sites are now testing Google Adsense in RSS feeds. Ironically a Microsoft Longhorn blog was the first on board, but blog-publishing company Weblogs Inc wasn't far behind.
Advertising in RSS feeds is a contentious issue. Some people don't want RSS feeds to be sullied by capitalism, while others think RSS Aggregators will enable users to filter out ads anyway. My own view is that RSS feeds are a first-class content citizen on the Web, like HTML, and so essentially there's no difference between putting ads in RSS and putting them on a webpage.
As well as competing with Google for online advertising business, Yahoo is busy on another front - Hollywood. In a recent interview with MediaPost, ex-Microsoft MSN honcho and now VP of "content operations" for Yahoo, Scott Moore, outlined his vision for Yahoo Media. His job is to develop content strategies for Yahoo, under Lloyd Braun, so what he says is a good indication of where Yahoo is headed. Moore pinpointed storytelling and user-generated content (e.g. blogs) as two key areas of Internet media.
Moore talked about harnessing such content "in a way that allows the highest-quality content to rise to the top." That's consistent with my own (market) view of blogs and user-generated content, so I'm encouraged to hear this coming from a media executive!
Lately the Microsoft PR corps has been wheeling out its big tech guns, Bill Gates and Jim Allchin, in order to hype up Longhorn - the next generation Windows OS. Allchin mingled with bloggers a couple of weeks ago to preview Longhorn. And he recently fronted a press release that waxed lyrical about 64-bit computing, Longhorn, and the history of Windows.
If you're curious what 64-bit computing is... don't be. It basically translates to enhanced computing performance, which according to Jim Allchin "makes a big difference for digital content creation and editing scenarios."
I feel a bit guilty for focusing so much on the Big Internet Companies (Google, Yahoo, MS). There's so much great innovation happening in Web 2.0 currently. From now on I will try and pick a 'niche' in Web 2.0 and highlight it in my Weekly Wrap-Up. I'll start with an easy one... blogging media empires. PaidContent.org mentioned a slew of them in a recent post - and not just the usual suspects (weblogs inc, gawker, etc).
One thing PaidContent.org didn't mention though was the humble individual Blogger, many of whom are making a decent living (usually via online advertising) and building their own solitary brand of "media empire". Darren Rowse from Australia is one of the more successful of that breed. It's similar to the Stand Alone Journalist concept that Chris Nolan wrote about recently in PressThink, which Pressthink owner Jay Rosen defined as "the self-sufficiency of the individual provider, made plausible by the Web." If that isn't Web 2.0 (Web as Platform), I don't know what is...
You've gotta love the enthusiasm in Josh Porter's post about Paul Rademacher’s Google Maps and Craigslist Combination (which btw needs a funky name).
Waxed Josh:
"This could be the most important interface we’ve yet seen in the early Web 2.0. While the APIs created by Amazon, Google, and eBay are cool in and of themselves, it’s combinatory interfaces like this that really shine. Note that anybody could have done this!"
All I can add to that is: Holy Remix Culture, Batman - you're right! ;-)
Happy 50th birthday to Dave Winer! Dave was probably my biggest inspiration when I started Read/Write Web, his Two-Way Web theory in particular. So enjoy today Dave :-)
Dave Winer has posted a comment by Jason Calacanis about adverts in RSS feeds. In a nutshell, Dave doesn't want ads in RSS feeds and Jason does. I found this comment from Dave to be very curious:
"BTW, what exactly is wrong with the way the BBC and NY Times do it? They write good one or two sentence summaries and link to the full story from the feed, and the ad is there, not in the feed. Jason, think about it -- RSS itself is an advertising medium, if you use it correctly."
Now I'm a big admirer of Dave Winer, even though he's frequently controversial and a lot of people dis him. He's done great things for RSS and he deserves a lot of respect and kudos for that, so I'll always try to stick up for him. But in this case I have to take issue with his stance on ads in RSS feeds. (btw I have been posting about this issue all week on Silicon Valley Watcher).
I left the following comment on Dave's RSS-focused blog and I want to repeat it here. It's my reply to Dave and all the other people up in arms over ads in RSS feeds...
I can't quite believe what I'm reading: you prefer excerpted RSS feeds to full-content?? Obviously this means you don't think RSS is a first-class content citizen, as HTML is - why else would anyone not put their full content into an RSS feed?
So you've pretty much answered the first 2 of the 3 questions I posted in response to your last post. But what I want to know is your answer to the third... ;-) (and I don't want to hear the 'I'll pay you by donation' argument from people, because clearly that doesn't scale unless you're Jason Kottke).
1) Which is better: an excerpted RSS feed (where you have to click through to read the whole post), or a full-text RSS feed with some ads?
Personally I'd prefer the latter.
2) Really, what *is* the difference between advertising in an RSS feed and advertising on a webpage? RSS is becoming the new HTML - why fight it?
3) What's wrong with Writers wanting to get paid for their work (just as software developers want to get paid for their work)?
