Comments for Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 10-16 Oct 2005

Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 10-16 Oct 2005

2005-10-17T09:01:02Z

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

Geeks being creative

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.

Yahoo! RSS Research

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.

Reading Lists

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.

Making money with Mash-Ups

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?"

Techie Post of the Week

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!

Comment from J Wynia on 2005-10-17

2005-10-17T11:05:57Z

"we need to evangelise the benefits of RSS rather than the technology itself"

That's the case with selling *anything* really. Other than the geekiest in any given category who look for the feature list, the spec sheet, etc, nearly *everyone* is looking for the benefits. Unfortunately, most people working in technology sell on features instead and wonder why their sales aren't better.

The toothpaste doesn't "contain peppermint oil", it "makes your breath minty fresh".

And, to push that a step further, selling the benefit works best when the benefit solves a painful problem.or appeals to a deep desire.

If you can tap into that combination, selling (whether just an idea or actual commerce) becomes genuinely effective.

Comment from Eoin O on 2005-10-17

2005-10-17T14:03:24Z

I believe there is a lot more 'fat' in the Oodle issue still to be chewed. Any site that derives any of it's income from advertisements or click throughs will resent anyone taking their content and any associated users away from their site. If it can be shown that the relationship is symbiotic and adds something - such as slicing the data in a new way and thus adding new marketing or retailing opportunities (e.g. the housing maps), I assume it will be acceptable. Otherwise I would expect to see a lot more turf wars when sites try and defend their virtual territory either by legal means (e.g. the
eBay example that Dare Obasanjo quotes) or simply building the same mash-up functionality into their site.
On a related point, as Mash-Ups develop, I also believe that statistics on site usage may become a lot harder to collect as cookie, JavaScript or image tracking techniques will become less useful in a world where people move between sites. This will make the whole situation murkier and without this information sites may not react correctly to the conditions and may struggle to develop correctly.

Comment from gerald on 2005-10-19

2005-10-19T19:17:27Z

A totally peronalized internet portal

1. Blog: express what you want to say, first step - words
2. Flickr: show your image, 2.0 step - from words to visual
3. podcast: show your voice, 2.1 step - sounds come into your world.
4. vlog: show your motions, your activities, your favorites - 2.2 step - video stuffs come into your world
5. Tags: Tag everything of your stuffs in your home, so people who have the same interests can find them. Also they can communicate with you according to your interests. I would like to call it third step, categorization and socialization.
6. Map Api: Locat yourself and your friends on the Earth. This is the fouth step - position. There are a lot of API of web map services online which are provided by google maps, yahoo maps, map quest, etc.
7. airset.com, it can make you organized and work in team.
Through this way, you can let your friends have more sense about you.
Until now, you almost have had your own home of internet set up.
If you want to make profit or get something back from what you have done above, please keep on reading.

Here I am trying to figue out a way to build some kinda of a business through web2.0 home. What I know is that people pay for solutions and good feelings. It is also a kind of exchange. You give them some solutions to the problem as well as you can give people the feeling that they like. Among the exchage process, value can be created.

I want to emphasis that you should provide your true information in the introduction of yourself. Your name. your background, your education, your professional experience, etc. Even if you don't have significant past, you still can express yourself there and try to create a bright future. But just one key, show out the true you.

OK. We have understand why we can create value though your 2.0 web home. Now we need to talk about the topics about supply chain.
How can you delieve your product? How you get money back? How you do your customer services?

Let talk about the money first. It is the easy part. You have a lot of choices. Credit card system is good for the business organization, and paypal is good for the personal users. Also you can get money order, casher's check. etc. It is not a big issue anymore.

Same thing does the delievery matters. I would like to break down it into two categries, tangible and intangible products. For the tangible products, it is pretty easy, just send them by ups, fedex, dhl, whatever you like. They will provide you tracking information or reciept. So you can have the protection from paypal. But for the intangible products, it is another story. I know there are a lot if fraud matters in this areas today. I can help you with that. If you want to know that, just contact with me.

Till now, you have transmited your product into profit. But it is not over yet. Don't forget keep talking with your customers. They are not only your customers but also they are your friends. They have same hobbies as you. Keep on talking. Make some parties, and activites. Let more people know you. Try to know more friends on the web as well as in real world.

Do like this for 6 month or 1 year.

Now, you have your SNS.