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.
Future of Web sites
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!]
ION RSS
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:
- RSS in the Enterprise
- RSS for Normal People and Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds; a re-cap of my January 2005 Read/Write Web post.
- Advertising in RSS - floodgates open; a report on my Google Adsense for feeds experiment on R/WW.
- Full-text vs Excerpt feeds; I wax philosophical...and in a later post recant our previous excerpted practises on ION RSS.
- Content has Value: on alternatives to ads; I start to ponder alternatives to advertising in RSS feeds...
- Ads in RSS should be measured by branding value, NOT click-through; behold, an alternative theory of my own!
Web 2.0 developments
Here are some new Web 2.0 apps and docs I noticed this week:
- new version of reBlog, a remix-blogging tool for people who "prefer curating content to writing original posts." (example: Eyebeam)
- Erik Benson's All Consuming becomes part of the Robot Co-op suite of tools. All Consuming aggregates all types of reviews, from movies to music to books and more. I like where the Robots are headed with this...
- TiddlyWiki, intriguingly described as "a reusable non-linear personal web notebook".
- Enhanced Yahoo! Messenger - now has free PC-to-PC calls (a challenge to Skype), photo sharing, Yahoo! 360 community tie-ins, increased spam protection.
- Paper Airplane and The Two Way Web; I haven't read through this paper yet (the title sounds like a 70's rock supergroup!), but it sounds fascinating.
Want more? Check out the Web Apps Compendium v1.0.
Techie Post of the Week: chmod 777 web
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!
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