This week: Geeks being creative, Yahoo! RSS research, Reading Lists, Making money with Mash-Ups, Techie Post of the Week - Dave Winer on Nerd TV
I'm now back in my home of New Zealand, after spending two fantastic weeks in Silicon Valley. As I look back on my time there, and look forward to going back, I'm reminded of this post from Susan Mernit. She pointed out there's a lot of start-up activity going on right now in the Valley, but what I liked best was the non-cynical way she put it:
"The Valley is humming with activity and with what some say is acquisition fever, but is often the happy sounds of geeks being creative."
Now that's something a lot of us can identify with: geeks being creative. With that in mind, here are some of the start-ups I have my eye on:
* Flock
* edgeio
* Sphere
* Measure Map (not a start-up, but Adaptive
Path's new product - which is kick-ass)
* Zazzle
* Zimbra
* zvents (companies whose names start with Z is
obviously all the rage)
There are loads more I could mention - but give me a break, I have jetlag ;-) TechCrunch has profiles of all of the above.
During the Web 2.0 Conference Yahoo! released a research report on the takeup of RSS. The resulting white paper was entitled RSS - Crossing into the Mainstream, which is a good indication of both the findings of the research and what Yahoo! is attempting to achieve in their use of RSS. The main points in the research were:
* Only 12% of the Internet population has heard the term RSS
* Only 4% of the population knowingly uses RSS
* 27% of the internet population uses RSS but doesn’t know that it's called
RSS.
The conclusion is that we need to evangelise the benefits of RSS rather than the technology itself. Or as Yahoo!'s head of RSS Scott Gatz wrote: "Focus your message on what your service does for consumers, not how it does it." Scott has a follow-up post that wraps up all of the reactions to the research.
OPML is an XML format for outlines, developed by Dave Winer (you may remember him from such developments as RSS and weblogs.com). OPML is beginning to be used more as a compliment to RSS - for example as a way to import and export peoples RSS subscriptions from one RSS Reader to another. Recently a new use for OPML has been discussed which may make it more mainstream - Reading Lists.
Dave Winer and Niall Kennedy of Technorati met to discuss the idea of Reading Lists. Dave has a more detailed explanation, but what it boils down to is this: a Reading List will enable you to subscribe to a group of RSS feeds in your RSS Aggregator of choice. Whenever the group is updated, the Reading List automatically updates too.
As Mike Arrington pointed out, this will be perfect for our Web 2.0 Workgroup - which is a group of premium Web 2.0 blogs. We're in the ongoing process of adding new members to the Workgroup, so wouldn't it be great to have a Reading List OPML feed that users could subscribe to. It has two main benefits for users: 1) they only need to subscribe to one 'feed' - the OPML file; 2) the Reading List automatically updates whenever the group is modified. For publishers, it makes it easy to promote groups of like-minded websites and it's very convenient to manage.
This week I wrote up my notes from the Mash-Ups panel at the Web 2.0 Conference. I concluded that although the technologies underlying mash-ups are still being sorted out - for example many mash-ups still use old school scraping to collect data - the business models are full steam ahead. A couple of days ago we saw a graphic illustration of this, when craiglist told classifieds 'meta' search engine Oodle to stop scraping its content. That generated a lot of healthy debate, but as yet there's no sign of a compromise between craigslist and Oodle.
Dare Obasanjo has an interesting post about the case, in which he suggests businesses that provide data and services need to "decide where it makes business sense to open up their website or service as a web platform". Essentially this boils down to companies deciding how open they want their data to be. It's one of the hardest issues to grapple with in Web 2.0. A valiant attempt to do so was this post by William Blaze a month and a half ago, in which he rightly asked: "just how open are these [Web 2.0] technologies really?"
This is the first time I've made a video my techie post of the week. Robert Cringley interviewed the father of RSS, Dave Winer. There's a text transcript too and here's a highlight from that, in which Dave explains why he developed his outliner program:
"And so it's a very long story from there to the point where they're actually - I had a commercial Outliner. But that is where I - that was the moment at which I flipped, and I said, "Okay, I'm not making a tool for programmers as much as I'm making a tool for people, for literate people - for people with ideas, for people with information that they want to organize." And it turned out to be a very good tool for doing exactly that."
The video is well worth your time watching, especially if you want to know one of the back stories to Web 2.0.
That's a wrap for another week!
This'll be my last post from Silicon Valley for a while. I've been here for two full weeks and I've had a fantastic time! I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mike Arrington for letting me stay at his house and making me feel so welcome - thanks Mike! It's been a hub of Web 2.0 activity in the house over the past two weeks. Fred Oliveira's been here working on edgeio, the product Mike and Keith Teare are building which will be in beta mode very soon. And Gabe Rivera of memeorandum fame has been staying here too. We've all had a great time and I consider them friends now. It's also spawned an actual Web product, the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Mike, Fred and I came up with the idea while sitting on the TechCrunch sofa drinking diet cokes, eating over-sized American pizza and watching The Daily Show (or something like that). The idea went from concept to website to an expanding network of Web 2.0 blogs very quickly, attracting such luminaries as Dave Winer and John Furrier to join. The Web 2.0 Workgroup will continue to grow organically, which is the beauty of it.
The Web 2.0 conference was a real thrill for me. The words 'energy' and 'enthusiasm' are ones that I've been associating with my experience of the conference. I've seen a lot of cynicism and even criticism of the bubble-ish nature of the conference, but it's difficult for me to identify with that because my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps that only proves I'm a conference newbie in Silicon Valley, but I'd like to hope I always maintain my enthusiasm for the Web and its growth. It's exciting when people are building so many great products and services on the Web platform. I wanna be in the middle of that :-)
I've met a lot of amazing people while I've been over here. Too many to list, but one highlight was the spicy noodles dinner with the father of RSS Dave Winer, the Workgroup founding fathers, and father of News Readers 2.0 Gabe. It was also great to meet the people I've been working for over the past months - Susan Mernit, Marc Canter, Dan Farber, and others I've done projects for. I also met my book co-author Josh Porter and briefly met Tim O'Reilly. Plus I met people I'll be working with in future (or hoping to, in some cases). I met so many great people and I ran out of time to meet others. Apologies to those people who I didn't get to meet.
I'll be back in Silicon Valley soon, with my family this time. I hope I can get a US working visa, because this is the place where I belong. In the meantime, I'll be back in New Zealand pumping out the Web 2.0 posts on Web 2.0 Explorer and Read/WriteWeb.
As TechCrunch reported, two more resources have been added to our nascent Web 2.0 Workgroup. Mike wrote:
"Podtech.net is a very popular podcast site hosted by John Furrier that is redefining corporate press practices. Recently, for instance, Yahoo gave Podtech an exclusive pre-announcement right to discuss their podcasting service last weekend.
SolutionWatch, written by Brian Benzinger, focuses on new companies and products that are defining the web 2.0 landscape. Much like TechCrunch, Brian is helping to put perspective on how these products fit into the overall web ecosystem."
Yesterday Podtech did a podcast discussion with the 3 founding members of the Workgroup, which you can listen to here. John has a fantastic studio set-up in Palo Alto, which made me feel like I was on mainstream radio when we did the recording. You'll recognize my voice from the kiwi twang :-)
As Mike said, we'll add more resources over time. We also have a bit of work to do on the webpage UI.
Uber classifieds site craiglist has requested that Oodle, a classifieds 'meta' search engine, refrain from scraping its content. This has the potential to be the first high-profile case of a mash-up site being slapped for taking another site's content.
In a recent ZDNet post, I wrote that the business models for Web 2.0 mash-ups are beginning to ramp up. Some of the revenue possibilities for sites like Oodle are advertising, lead generation and/or affiliates, transactional, subscription.
Oodle wrote on their blog that they send craigslist "free traffic" and they "don't compete with them by taking listings." John Battelle said that craigslist's response to Oodle "feels counter to the vibe craigslist has always had".
However Jason Calacanis summed up the counter argument with this response in Battelle's comments:
"Fair use is one thing, wholesale scraping/syndication is another. Oodle, Indeed, etc. should a) get permission and b) consider paying Craig a licensing fee for his content."
For more context, this is how the Oodle FAQ describes what Oodle does:
"How do I place a classified listing on Oodle?
Oodle doesn't directly accept classified listings. As a search engine for local listings, we regularly scan hundreds of online sources for classifieds like local newspapers and eBay. To have your listing show up in Oodle, just place your listing with a local classified provider and we'll find it."
It's a difficult issue and I don't have an easy answer with which to finish my post. On the one hand, craigslist is the source of some of Oodle's data and so craigslist has a right to protect that from mis-use. On the other hand, Oodle is clearly providing value to users on the UI side - which is one of the things Web 2.0 and mash-ups is about. It would be best for all concerned if craigslist and Oodle made an agreement with each other, for the benefit of all users. And it would be fair for Oodle to share some of their revenue with craigslist. This is all easier said than done, of course. It's an interesting test case.
Whether you love or hate the Web 2.0 meme, you have to admit it's gained a lot of traction in both tech and business circles. Now we're beginning to see cultural and sociological posts about Web 2.0, although Danah Boyd and Barb Dybwad have both written great posts on similar themes in the past.
Anil Dash wrote that the Web 2.0 conference last week had some "cultural myopia", because it was attended mostly by an "Old Boy's Club" of mostly white middle class males. Anil brought up a very good point related to that: Web companies these days want to be both media and technology companies, so they need to "connect with a wide variety of audiences".
In one way, Anil's point was illustrated by the attention the What Teens Want panel got at the conference. A lot of people told me it was their favorite panel, because it opened their eyes to a world they previously knew nothing about - how teenagers use new media and what products they use. For example a lot of folks I spoke to seemed shocked that the teenagers on the panel never pay for media and they rip n' burn whenever possible.
Dare Obasanjo amplified Anil's point in a follow-up post:
"Most of the speakers and attendees are white males in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. There are few blacks, women, indians or east asians. Much fewer than I'm used to seeing during my typical workday or at other conferences I have attended."
There's not much I can say to that, being squarely in the white middle class male demographic. The only minority aspect of me in the Web 2.0 world is that I live and work from the other side of the world, in New Zealand. And having been in Silicon Valley for two weeks, I can confirm that I'd be a lot more successful in Web 2.0 if I was based in California. I don't think that counts as discrimination though.
Incidentally: before I pursue my American Dream, I need to somehow get a working visa. Talk about cultural obstacles for Web 2.0 - do you know how hard it is for a non-US citizen to get a visa to work here?! Anyway, that's a topic for another post...
To wrap up, Lucas Gonze has a post about the class system of the Web:
"The web is middle class, filesharing networks are street, pay-per-download DRM stores are aristocracy. The technology implies a literal pecking order."
I have to say, it's great to see these issues being discussed. It makes a nice change from all the Web 2.0 definitions and bubble talk that have dominated the conversation lately. I'd much rather hear people challenging the cultural and sociological aspects of Web 2.0, than read another stupid list of what isn't Web 2.0 or moralizing posts about the current 2.0 bubble. Let's keep the conversation about Web 2.0 diverse and forward-thinking.
This is the best thing I've written in ages... thanks to Saurier Duval for doing a mash-up of my blog.
Some choice extracts:
"The stats they released today indicate theyíre well on their way to explain them in the Web as a serviceí concept (which is by no means a new regular feature of Web services ìpayloadsî ñ digital objects that are a millionaire already. The $568 per link is just icing on the Web."
[that one's for Mr Barren!]
"Itís been a fantastic 3 days, very very busy and bustling, and hugely enjoyable. Iím buzzing ñ but trying my best to be stable and meeting demand."
"Now, I have other irons in the sequel: Dotcom 2.0."
"I love reading old books about the rising VC interest in Web 2.0 technologies such as ìArchitecture of Participationî and ìcost-effective scalabilityî carry with them a lot of the shoes and the future of what Web 2.0 is that mainstream people will need and want."
Yes, shoes are a fundamental aspect of Web 2.0 that I need to explore much more :-) I haven't even finished reading the mash-up post yet, but it's brilliant stuff.
p.s. yes, this is kind of a slow news day on R/WW. It's my last day in Silicon Valley (for a while), so humor me...
For the record, I have actually read Microserfs, by Douglas Coupland. Indeed just over a year ago I wrote on my blog that Microserfs is my favourite Douglas Coupland book.
I wasn't in the room when Dave Winer talked to the others about it, leading him to write this:
"I'm over at the Web 2.0 Workgroup at Mike Arrington's, and if you can believe this, none of these guys have read Microserfs. Totally 1.0. Unfuckingreal."
I just thought I'd set the record straight, seeing as I'm a Literary Geek and my reputation is at stake here :-)
Mike Arrington has another Ode to Memeorandum on Techcrunch. I'm a big fan of tech.memeorandum too and it's changing the way I read blogs and catch up with the latest tech news. My first rave review of memeorandum was a month ago when it went live and since then I've met Gabe in person - and seen how dedicated he is to developing it.
Some people have commented that the UI of tech.memeorandum needs more work. Basically it's all text and is organized by story/article. The popular and most linked-to articles have bolder and bigger headlines, so they stand out more. Relevant or related links are added below the main article - and the beauty of it is individual posts don't need to actually link to each other for this to happen. Recency is another factor in where the article is placed. The strength of memeorandum, IMHO (and I'm slightly biased I think, having met Gabe and become friends with him) is that the algorithms are very strong and are automated.
Memeorandum is indeed probably more automated than Google News, because Google News selects all of its news sources and Gabe only selects *some* of his news sources - the rest of the sources bubble up as the conversation brews.
But back to the UI, I think it can be improved still. But the fact I now visit and reload the webpage multiple times a day - and that *I don't* subscribe to its RSS feed - tells you that tech.memeorandum has literally become an RSS Aggregator for me. Now what would be awesome is if I could have a personalized memeorandum, where I could enter my 200+ feeds and let memeorandum sort and filter them for me. But there are other factors to consider, for example a few of my personal subscriptions (friends, family, etc) don't link to others in my subscription list - so they wouldn't make it onto a memeorandum-style layout. But I do think it's worth RSS Aggregators considering clustering techniques like memeorandum's, in order to improve the user experience when reading hundreds of feeds.
On a related topic, Fred has a great post on Reading Lists - an intriguing concept whereby people can save a list of their favourite blogs/RSS sources and distribute them to other people via OPML. Dave Winer has more details on Reading Lists, including mentioning that the Web 2.0 Workgroup will maintain one. Reading Lists is another thing that could disrupt the traditional news reading paradigm. More on that in a later post.
Finally, I came across another interesting news re-organization service on Digg today (itself a news re-organizer). It's called Newsmap and it's a mash-up of Google Maps and Reuters news and "displays the most recent news from Reuters news agency on the place they take place." It's an interesting concept, mapping news articles by place, but not fully fleshed out yet.
What all of these services have in common is that they're remixing not only news, but the way we track and read news. It's almost like it's a step beyond RSS now, even though they all use RSS (or a related XML format like OPML) to organize news. Perhaps this is a sign that RSS has become a mature platform for innovation in news presentation and delivery.
The Web 2.0 Workgroup has expanded to 4 blogs (and more to come!), with the addition of Dave Winer's Two-Way Web blog. This is awesome news, because the Two-Way Web site was a defining influence on me when I first started blogging.
Dave was around at the TechCrunch house later in the day and then we all went out for spicy noodles, a famous Scripting News dinner. And boy were those spicy noodles nice! My Silicon Valley initiation is now complete :-) Here's a picture of all the Web 2.0 Workgroup members, plus Gabe from memeorandum, at Jing Jing:
From left to right: Gabe, Dave, me, Mike, Fred
I'm sensing a backlash about the rising VC interest in Web 2.0. Mike Rundle takes aim at Flock in his post subtitled "The Leaning Tower of Buzz". He thinks Flock is only useful to the blog crowd and doesn't have a viable business model. Bart from Flock disagrees, saying in the comments that they do have a plan to make money and the market will decide. Then I went and read Kevin Burton's post, entitled Dot Bomb All Over Again?. Kevin blames "tech reliance on Venture Capital" for what he thinks is too much hype and too little value. Om Malik specifically references YouTube, a video-sharing service that got $5 million in funding, and says the "Web 2.0 funding frenzy is in full effect."
Ben Barren (in between subtle mocking of my paper-based millionaire status) calls all of this an "emerging land of absurdity where a live prototype that can be replicated in 90 days, that has no business model or revenue is considered a business."
So what's my opinion on all this? Well I'm right in the middle of Silicon Valley as I write this post. I've had a great time over here and I've felt lots of energy and enthusiasm from all the Web people I've met here. I've seen a Flock employee sleeping on the floor of the garage-office Flock occupies in Palo Alto, in mid-afternoon, due to overwork no doubt. People are putting in a lot of effort to build new Web-based businesses. It's OK to be slightly skeptical about the long-term value, but I have to say I still think it's a land of opportunity rather than absurdity. Admittedly I'm a pretty naive person when it comes down to it - or maybe just happy (as the Nirvana song goes).
OK so there's a lot of hype. So the VCs are throwing money around. So get to work. Build something Web-based that mainstream people will need and want. Now's the time to do it.
