I've resigned from my day job, so in 4 weeks time I will be fully self-employed. I'll be doing freelance analysis and writing work, plus an exciting project which I will advise you of soon. I've been extremely busy lately, hence the relative lack of blogging. But soon I'll be back into it and writing regular thoughtful posts again.
This is a great time to be doing things with RSS and Web 2.0 technologies in general. All the big guns have placed bets on RSS by now. AOL is implementing RSS, in partnership with Feedster (btw I mentioned this on my blog more than a month ago, so it's not new news). Yahoo has been onto RSS for ages, Microsoft is embracing RSS in its next OS (Windows Vista), Google almost certainly has things up its sleeve re RSS (the implementation of RSS in its Personalized portal is pathetic really, but I'm certain it's just the beginning...). Not to mention all the exciting stuff happening with companies like Feedburner and Nooked and Charlie Wood's new company and - etc etc!
There's even some great stuff starting to happen in my part of the world, New Zealand and Australia, which is exciting! Oh, and I'll be heading over to San Francisco in October for the Web 2.0 Conference. More excitement!
I'm really stoked to be able to devote myself full-time to the Web technologies I've been blogging about for 2-3 years now. If you have any analysis, research or writing work for me, send me an email. Can you guess I'm excited? ;-)
- Google does RSS... sort of (you can now add RSS feeds to your Personalized
page by clicking 'Create a Section'. It's made with cool Ajax, but this is no RSS
Aggregator folks... come on Google, you can do much better!)
- Attention Trust is a project led by Steve
Gillmor and others that is the next evolution of his Attention idea (TechCrunch breaks it down)
- FeedShake: Merge, sort and filter RSS feeds
(not a new idea, but if services like these manage all the behind-the-scenes stuff for
users... well it could be a winner)
- Denver Post's
NewsHound service is a "private-label RSS reader built on top of the NewsGator Media
Platform" (lots of these customized RSS Readers in the media market right now) [via David
Beisel]
- Poynter: Shhh, don't
mention RSS (media companies are introducing branded RSS Readers, but not mentioning
the term 'RSS' when promoting it)
- New "Blog Talk" feature on
Newsweek website, powered by Technorati (interesting use of blogosphere tracking in a
mainstream publication) [via Susan Mernit]
- Silkworm: web
2.0 apps require failure analysis (some excellent points to note for Developers and
Remix Artists alike)
-
Susan Mernit on Web 2.0: It's about connecting the dots--no, we ARE the dots (nice summary of one of
the main themes of Web 2.0 - it's about connecting people and 'small pieces'
together)
- David Weinberger gives
his blessing to Web 2.0 (quote: "...put all of the Web integrative pieces together
and make them available to more and more people, and you're talking about something
different because you've changed the politics of the technology.")
-
More Web 2.0 for teachers (I love how academia is putting all our theory and tools into practise.
Check out this post "Understanding Web 2.0 and the New Information Environment" from
pedersondesigns.com)
-
Yahoo Buys Widget-maker Konfabulator (what are widgets? A quote from Yahoo Widgets website: "These little guys hang out
on your screen and give you quick, easy access to favorite content.")
- Tim O'Reilly
says web software companies buying desktop software companies (e.g. Yahoo buys
Konfabulator) is a sign of a "long term platform shift that I've been calling Web
2.0."
Onfolio is offering R/WW readers a coupon code entitling the bearer to $30 off a purchase of Onfolio Professional before August 31st (a 30% saving off the normal $99.95 price). To use the coupon, enter it at the time of purchase. Coupon Code: RM857202
This week: Thoughts on what News Corp will do with MySpace, New RSS Aggregator stats from Feedburner and Pheedo, Greasemonkey and Firefox under security spotlight, Microsoft eyes new horizons, political post of the week.
You've all heard the news by now - Rupert Murdoch's News Corp bought MySpace (and whatever else Intermix Media Inc. owns). For those of you not familiar with MySpace, here's Reuters' description:
"MySpace.com is the most popular of the once-trendy social networking sites, which allow people with common interests to seek dates, friendship and professional relationships."
Once-trendy? Ouch! In any case, over the past year or so MySpace has been the peoples choice in social networking applications, ahead of Friendster and Orkut. So what does the purchase mean for social media and the Web as platform?
Danah Boyd at Many-to-Many sees some Big Brotherish overtones to the deal:
"Unlike the other YASNS, the value of MySpace comes from the data on media trends that is the core of what people share on that service. [...] Marketers who want to understand the constantly shifting youth trends are often looking for a perch from which to be the ideal voyeur. And with MySpace, they found it."
Those concerns are echoed in Trent Lapinski's detailed post about the background of MySpace owners Intermix:
"Now all of this user information is in the hands of News Corp. and they can pretty much do whatever they want with it."
But it's not all 1984 and 'sticking it to The Man'. From the content producer's point of view, MySpace is known to be a very popular site for music and it's hard to see how News Corp's purchase will adversely affect that. For example, take this comment from Blogcritics.org:
'In fact, MySpace has eclipsed MTV has a music destination. Former Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan says, "now that MySpace is here, bands don't necessarily need a label to be heard."'
According to this mp3.com article, a Geffen Records honcho called MySpace "an incredibly compelling and organic content distribution platform". There are a lot of mainstream rock stars who use MySpace - e.g. Billy Corgan (here's his MySpace homepage), Black Eyed Peas, Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Green Day. But more importantly there's a Long Tail of non-mainstream artists and wannabes who use MySpace to promote their music.
So despite the valid concerns over users personal data in the hands of a big media company, from a content creation p.o.v. things look good. It'll continue to be a platform for up-and-coming artists and mainstream musicians alike. Also the News Corp-backed MySpace may spin off a music selling business, to take on market leaders iTunes and Rhapsody. More competition in that space will mean better deals for music buyers.
Online advertising company Pheedo published some RSS stats this week. They revealed that Tuesday and Wednesday are the best days for publishing; and early morning and late night are when people most often read their feeds. In terms of the RSS Aggregator market, which I have been following for quite some time now, Pheedo said:
"Consistent with other RSS aggregator market share reports on the Internet, Pheedo is seeing Bloglines atop our feed reader statistics, followed by Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator and Sharpreader. In aggregate, these readers are used by almost 70 percent of people subscribing to Pheedo managed RSS content."
Not dissimilar to Feedburner's latest stats published by Brian Livingston, except NetNewsWire doesn't make Pheedo's top 5 (it's number 2 in Feedburner).
Also I noticed that the latest Feedburner stats included podcasting clients, so I asked the Feedburner guys if they would filter those out for me. They kindly did that and so here now is the Top 10 RSS Readers (excluding the 10 most popular feeds AND excluding podcasting aggregators):
1. Bloglines (25.73%)
2. NetNewsWire (10.63%)
3. Firefox Live Bookmarks (8.86%)
4. My Yahoo (8.58%)
5. NewsGator Online (5.03%)
6. FeedDemon (4.70%)
7. (not identified) (3.56%)
8. Pluck (2.75%)
9. SharpReader (2.37%)
The top 5 in this list makes up 59% of the total, compared to 69% in Feedburner's previous survey in January. So between Feedburner and Pheedo, it seems that the top 5 Aggregators are still dominant - although Feedburner's latest stats suggest the market is fragmenting a bit (which Brian wrote about in his article).
Overall though, I'm not sure there's a whole lot we can read into these stats. For example MyYahoo doesn't make Pheedo's top 5, yet from an RSS take-up point of view they're arguably the most important RSS Aggregator on the market (see these posts I've written in the past for context). Nevertheless we can glean/guess some high-level trends from these stats, so thanks to Feedburner and Pheedo for sharing their numbers with us.
Mark Pilgrim set off alarm bells in the developer world this past week when he revealed a serious security flaw in Greasemonkey. For people not familiar with Greasemonkey, it's a program that enables users of the Mozilla Firefox web browser to install "user scripts" which modify specific web pages [paraphrasing the Wikipedia definition]. Greasemonkey basically allows users who have it installed to enhance and customize webpages - for example embedding price comparisons in amazon.com webpages. It's a very powerful tool, albeit one that only seriously geeky people are likely to be using at this point in time.
The security issue makes it more of a challenge to roll out Greasemonkey to the masses - and also unintentionally makes it harder for the Firefox browser to be be accepted by mainstream users. Security is probably the number 1 concern for most corporate IT honchos and anything which makes Firefox seem like more of a security risk is going to delay its uptake. This CNet article from March 2005 does a good job of summarizing the issues.
Let's hope the Greasemonkey developers fix up the current security holes and begin to build in more safety measures. I would love to see both Greasemonkey and Firefox used by more than just techies in the future.
The OS Formally Known As Longhorn (TOFKAL) is now known as Windows Vista, with a tagline of "Bringing clarity to your world." More on the news here and here. Roll on the "hasta la vista" jokes...
Normally the final spot in my Weekly Wrap-Up is reserved for a geeky post that caught my attention during the week. But I feel the need to turn down the Geek-o-meter for a bit and highlight a post about Web 2.0 in The Real World. I came across this fascinating post by Waldo Jaquith, describing a fundraising event featuring Senator Barack Obama. OK so I admit I'm a Barack fan (now you know my politics!), but even so I really enjoyed reading this post. Waldo both described the speech...
"When Sen. Obama was introduced, to the strains of U2’s “Elevation,” the audience went nuts. It was as if Dave Matthews (or, more appropriately, Bono) had just walked onto stage. The admiration and awe was palpable. Obama is an excellent speaker, and he played the audience like a drum."
...and wrote about what it felt like to be a blogger at such an event:
"What made our invitation to the event noteworthy is not that we were treated like journalists. That’s an increasingly-common trend, although this would be a first in Virginia politics, I believe. The title of “journalist” was more of a fig leaf — the Kaine campaign was providing us with an opportunity to talk with Tim Kaine and Barack Obama."
I want to read more posts like that, from all parts of the political spectrum.
That's a wrap for another week!
- IDG
CEO quoted in Wired: "Every blogger is a rock band without a record contract." (I
guess I'm supposed to dislike that comparison, but strangely it agrees with me... because
indeed I am looking for "a record contract", to use that analogy)
- Jason Dowdell
and Pete Freitag created two mashups using Findory's API (excellent work! see also Greg Linden's post about
the Findory API)
- Guardian
editor questions News Corp's purchase of MySpace et al (I don't entirely agree with
the article, but I did like this quote: "Murdoch should note the reverse takeover going
on at the BBC where its online business is moving from the periphery to the core of all
its activities.")
- Marc Canter's DLA
vision comes to reality with the GoingOn Network (I helped with the spec writing, but
this really is 100%
Marc's baby and about 10-15 years in the making for him)
- BlogPulse Profile is a beta blog tracker
(some
folks are very excited by it)
-
VeriSign says number of web sites being opened purely to publish pay-per-click
advertising links is rocketing (I'd add, also the number of tools that enable spammers to
populate their scummy websites with other peoples writing or machine-generated
content)
- TechDirt comments on
the VeriSign article (they say: "it's basically a lot of junk cluttering the
internet". That's exactly what I've been saying too...)
- Robert Scoble says
forget the A-List, find 10 other bloggers to link to you (right on! btw, I'm also
trialing the "secret tool" that Robert talks about... and he's right, it's a
beauty!)
- Silicon
Valley Watcher: most startups should avoid venture funding, not pursue it (good tips
for new Web 2.0 entrepreneurs)
-
Darren Rowse dines out on his $14,436.45 Google Adsense cheque (he got increased
coverage after the Slashdotting and lots of new readers)
p.s. I'm still looking for a good name for this list of links. Points of Presence - what do you think? I figure I need a name without the term "Web 2.0" in it, but which nevertheless indicates that Web 2.0 is what these links are about. New suggestions welcome :-)
- There are 1.12 million feeds in Bloglines that "matter", says Ask Jeeves Blog (meaning at least 1 person subscribes to it. nb: SEW and Niall
both point out that some blogs have multiple feeds)
- Feedburner begins
to expand into "major media accounts and global relationships" (fulfilling all the
hype I lavished onto them in my Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004
post last year)
-
Comparing tech companies to countries (check out the comments - there are some funny
comparisons. e.g. "delicious is Chechnya: Comprehensible only to those inside.")
- Profile of Bokee,
China's top blogging network (they're planning a "virtual currency", a la Korea's
Cyworld, which will enable Bokee bloggers to charge their readers)
- Study finds usability
issue with blogs (if you're a blog consultant, the
PDF report is well worth pondering)
- Tony
Gentile tells us to expect continued integration in Yahoo's network (yes the social
networking, aggregation, RSS, media, etc pieces are all coming together quite nicely for
Yahoo)
- PaidContent.org on
Yahoo's Silicon Valley and Hollywood goings-on (see also
WSJ.com and Om
Malik)
- Greasemonkey
has a serious security flaw (Mark Pilgrim sounded the warning and the Greasemonkey
blog has details)
- Slashdot
community debates the future of Firefox (as one commenter said, "I want to know how
firefox devs plan to address security concerns with the browsers.")
- Backing up your
Gmail account (use pop3 or the auto-forward feature)
nb: The photo of the dog and its long tail is from Anil Dash's Flickr photo stream.
I'm making yet another attempt at a regular branded list of Web 2.0 links. Let me admit straight up that I've copied the following format from Ypulse, Anastasia Goodstein's excellent site that covers New Media for Generation Y. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as I have discovered, so I thought it's worth giving this a go on my blog.
- Mash-Ups
the wild wild west of the Web (pretty good business overview of Web 2.0 and Remix
Culture - and don't miss the slide show 'Sampling the Web's Best Mash-Ups')
- Steve Rubel
wants Microsoft to bet the company on Web 2.0 (in the comments, I pointed to my own analysis of Microsoft and
Web 2.0 - in short, I think millions of Windows-run 'devices' will be their interface
into Web 2.0)
- Om Malik gets cozy with
Marc Andressen (I like Marc's point that new minds and new tech talents will grow in
places "we would have never looked before". right on!)
- Latest Harry
Potter book digitally pirated within 12 hours (a fully scanned + proofread ebook
within 12 hours... I still don't want to read it though) (via waxy)
- More great Tim
O'Reilly Web 2.0 quotes (someone advised me recently that I need to work
on my "pithy quotes", if I'm to get any mainstream press coverage as an analyst - see Red Herring
link below)
- RSS
Goes Corporate (I gave some background info for this Red Herring article, but I don't
rate a mention)
- You
can't sell content online (Mary Hodder says selling services that help manage data and
content - such as filtering, search and aggregation - is where the money is)
- Charlie Wood forsees the rise of post-processing feed services, such as inserting ads into feeds. (what's really interesting will be the
non-advertising services. e.g. how about more remixing functionality)
- News Corp buys MySpace owner for $580 million (I hadn't realized that mainstream music groups like Black Eyed Peas and R.E.M. streamed their latest releases on MySpace)
-
Does MySpace sale signal Web 2.0 peak? (I agree with Adam Rifkin in the
comments, it's only just begun!)
This week: The future of RSS, Amazon turns 10, Yahoo HotJobs, big bucks for blogging, techie post of the week - RSS systems.
I'm pleased to announce Onfolio as the new sponsor of the Weekly Wrap-Up! To celebrate, Onfolio has a special offer for Read/Write Web readers. The following coupon code entitles the bearer to $30 off a purchase of Onfolio Professional before August 31st, a 30% saving off the normal $99.95 price. To use the coupon, enter it at the time of purchase. Coupon Code: RM857202
A number of posts came out this week with thoughts on how RSS is evolving and the need for new kinds of feed management tools. VC Fred Wilson thinks centralised RSS Readers (like Bloglines) are on the way out. What's needed, according to Fred, is new ways to manage our feeds and make them available to other apps to use. An example he gives is "applications and services that can use the [RSS] infrastructure that Microsoft is building into the operating system layer to add value."
Don't miss the comments to Fred's post, there are some excellent points. e.g. Charlie Wood says that Feedburner is a great example of a "value added service" (they would be my prime example too). Heather Green then comments "What I am interested in watching develop are the services that are created on top of RSS, like maybe a service that parses for resumes or job listings."
In a similar vein, Tommy Lee look-a-like Nivi wrote an interesting post entitled RSS is the TCP/IP Packet of Web 2.0. In it he asked: "will RSS become the fundamental building block of Web 2.0 and the Internet Operating System?". See also his follow-up post, featuring an analysis of Jonathan Aquino's "command line for the Web" app YubNub.
Other thought-provoking posts on these themes include David Beisel's musings, Heather Green's The Evolution of RSS, According to Yahoo, and Michael Parekh's theory about "Broadband Content End-Runs". All of this is head-spinning stuff, but well worth pondering if you're interested in finding out how RSS is beginning to outgrow its blogging roots.
Oh and incidentally, Atom (an alternative RSS format) was all but officially released this week. I'll review this further once the techies have finished their latest bout of handbags at ten paces :-)
This week Amazon celebrated its 10th birthday.
Amazon is in a way is the quintessential Web 2.0 company, because they've been using the
Web as a platform for all of their 10-year existence. They recognized the power of the
Read/Write Web before most Internet companies, by inviting their users to contribute
reviews and rank products - amongst many other community-enabling features. They were one
of the first bigco's to open up their data with APIs and they made it easy for
third-party sellers to become affiliates (currently more than a quarter of Amazon's sales
are via a third party). Not to mention that Amazon sold products from The Long Tail long
before Chris Anderson
popularized the term.
And boy did Amazon celebrate in style! They ran promotions for a Hall of Fame, Wish List Spree, Special Deliveries and finished up with A Show of Thanks - a live concert with "Bob Dylan, Norah Jones, Bill Maher, Hall of Fame writers, and exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage from the Lord of the Rings trilogy."
nb: I have a post brewing about Amazon's future, which hopefully I'll publish this week.
This week Yahoo announced a new "jobs search engine" - and it's a shot across the bow for the online jobs market. Yahoo HotJobs crawls the Web looking for job vacancies and automatically adds them to its index. Although this will probably "cannibalize" its paid listings, it'll also take a big bite out of its two main rivals in this market - Monster and CareerBuilder.
Forrester analyst Charlene Li predicts that the next big thing in online classifieds is social classifieds, "where the ability to connect people to each other will be the hallmark of success." This is actually already a feature of social networking sites such as LinkedIn and niche market blogs like PaidContent.org.
My Australian cousin Darren Rowse announced recently that he got a Google Adsense cheque for "between $10k and $20k ($USD)" for the month of May. Holy Gamoly! Darren works extremely hard on writing content for his 20 or so blogs, so full credit to him for the financial rewards.
The income revelation led to a Slashdotting and the inevitable blog-trashing comments from the /. community. But some commenters had good things to say, like this one: "He [Darren] is just an info junkie who has happened to find a way to make a living at his passion."
Professional blogging is different things to different people. For some, it's part of their day job. For me, it's my way of trying to get a day job like those guys ;-). Reputation is my currency in the blogosphere and I'm hoping it pays off in the long run.
I'm still spinning my wheels on the future of RSS. Dave Winer wrote an interesting riff on this. Here's an excerpt:
"RSS is more than a format, it's an approach to creating systems. [...] The whole point of RSS, Jim [Moore] argues (imho correctly) is to make connecting systems together so easy that users can do it themselves, without any help from system managers or vendors. This is a brilliant observation, in all my years thinking about RSS, I had never approached it from this direction."
I'm not entirely sure what that means yet, but if Dave says it's a brilliant observation - then obviously the rest of us need to think seriously about it.
That's a wrap for another week!
You've got to hand it to Technorati, they sure know how to get media and blog attention. A recent Wired article makes the extraordinary claim that Technorati is "a public utility on a global scale". With no mention whatsoever of other blog search engines, Wired compares Technorati to Google - as if Technorati is as omnipresent in the blog search space as Google is in the Web search space. And in a sense it is, due to breathless coverage such as this Wired piece.
Technorati is everywhere in the blogosphere. Even with all the recent negative coverage about ongoing technical issues and supposedly selling out bloggers - it all drives Technorati's media stock up. Any publicity is good publicity is an old saying that is more relevant than ever, in this new media world where attention is so hard to get.
This of course was one of the takeaways from my post last week regarding Technorati's current dominance of the Alexa charts, over comparatively publicity-poor cousins like Feedster and PubSub (notice I didn't use the word 'competitor' this time!). Some people mocked my post and said that "boiling it down to alexa traffic really doesn't get it."
Oh I beg to differ. What the Alexa charts showed was that Technorati gets it big time - attention, that is.
However (before you loosen up your comment-flaming fingers for a bout of furious typing) the people who dissed my post are right in some ways. There are many other companies in the blog search 'space' that are equal to or even better than Technorati - e.g. Feedster, PubSub, Blogdigger, Bloglines. These and others are all very worthy companies with differing technologies and not necessarily in the same niche markets. The Alexa charts didn't do justice to that point, I totally agree.
But when it comes to getting attention and publicity and sheer buzz, Technorati is in an envious position. You only have to read the Wired piece, and look at the Alexa charts I published, to see what I mean.
A bit of admin before I start. The Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up is looking for a new sponsor, now that ThePort Network has completed its sponsorship arrangement with me. Dan Backus from ThePort Network told me they had a lot of positive feedback to the sponsorship and their product offerings - which I was very pleased to hear. I want to thank Dan and ThePort Network for sponsoring me and I wish them all the best with their Web 2.0 product range.
So now I'd like to put a call out for a new sponsor. Please contact me to discuss.
This week: Big events and news on the Web, automatic content for the people, things you can do with RSS, API round-up, Techie Post of the Week: Social principles of Web 2.0.
It was a tough week for the Western world, when London was struck by a bombing attack. I don't want to use this tragic event as a backdrop for tech talk, but I do think it's noteworthy that the Web has become a crucial tool for news dissemination and discussion nowadays. The Wikipedia page on the London bombings was a comprehensive and thorough work-in-progress as the news unfolded. As was the BBC's Web coverage, so it's not like mainstream media is being run out of business. But it's clear that the Web is a key platform now when it comes to covering big news events - at least on a par with television and newspapers.
So-called social software websites played a big role too. Flickr was used extensively by people to post photos and for discussions. Personally I found myself visiting the sites of bloggers I read who live in London, are British expats and even kiwis who were in London at the time. And when you consider things like the LiveJournal Moodgrapher, which recorded a mood of "sadness and shock" amongst LiveJournalers following the attack, well you realise how integral the Web has become when dealing with such events.
On a less serious note, the Live 8 event was also covered very well on the Web. Indeed, apparently AOL's Web coverage was far superior to MTV's on the television. PaidContent.org quoted this from an AP person: "AOL's coverage was so superior, it may one day be seen as a historical marker in drawing people to computers instead of TV screens for big events." The latest Gillmor Gang has some interesting comments on this, particularly from guest Susan Mernit.
This week I wrote a musing post about the new age of automated content we're seeing on the Web. I looked at (what I deemed to be) both good and bad examples of this phenomenon and concluded that my decisions about such matters are more moral than legal. It turned into a very interesting discussion, which is still open. As I noted in a comment I made later in the thread, my goals for this post were to come to an understanding of:
a) where my own content fits in with this new era of automated websites - I've established that I'm comfortable with sites like Planet Web 2.0 and Memeorandom, and even [Article Bot-generated] Stock Pick Report to a degree; and
b) what things should we, as users of the Web, be wary of in this new era of automation. And I think we should be wary of hundreds of thousands of robot-generated pages that have no redeeming social value for the Web and will clutter up search engine results.
It's a great discussion about Web 2.0 morals and ethics. Join in, the conversation's still happening!
Tim Yang continues his run of excellent tools and resources - he was the bloke who created the Google News To RSS Scraper called scrappygoo. Now he's come up with a Wiki featuring an extensive list of things you can do with RSS. Things like:
- Track Fedex packages
- Get bargains at Ebay
- Get stock updates
- Get the weather reports
- Find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products
- Track Music, radio shows, TV clips
- Stay updated on someone's schedule
- Get cinema schedule updates
- Read your favourite comics
Check out the wiki for the whole list.
But wait, there's more! I also want to highlight Chris Campbell's round-up of APIs (via Eric Lunt). As Chris wrote, "if you're interested in adding to the Web 2.0 goodness, you've got to start understanding APIs." Too right - go check it out!
Ian Davis (of Planet Web 2.0 fame) wrote a great post about what he calls the Web 2.0 principles of "participation, openness and communication." Here's how he defines this:
"Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology. It's about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts."
Obviously this theory has a lot to do with the whole automated content issue I raised this week. Often when we talk of Web 2.0, we mean APIs and RSS and XML and all those other acronyms. But the whole idea of the 'read/write' Web is that everyone can and does contribute thoughts and ideas to the Web. So the social aspects of Web 2.0 - participation, openness, two-way communication - are just as important as the platform and the acronyms. On this I heartily endorse Ian's position.
But we all have a lot of work to do yet, when it comes to defining what is socially acceptable use of content and the Web - and what is not. I myself am still working it out and I'm only just beginning to get comfortable with the idea of other sites re-publishing my writing. The Remix Culture requires a big mindshift for everyone, so we're all figuring it out as we go along.
That's a wrap for another week!
I know it's the weekend and not the ideal time for a blog conversation, but there's a great one happening in the comments of my recent post On Bots and Content Creation / Aggregation. I'd like to get more points of view on this discussion, which is focused on the moral aspects of automatically-generated websites. I have strong views on it, as does Don Harrold from Article Bot. Why not jump in and add your opinion? To me, this is a crucial issue in an era of ever-increasing automation of websites and blogs.
