Mike mentioned today that the Web 2.0 Workgroup that Mike, Fred Oliveira and I formed about a month and a half ago has grown to twenty blogs. We've also added a Swiki search engine (a group search with tag clouds) and categorized the blogs:
| Category | Sites |
| Analysis & Trends | Read/WriteWeb, Dion Hinchcliffe, Susan Mernit’s Blog, Web 2.0 Explorer |
| Companies & Products | TechCrunch, SolutionWatch, eHub |
| Design & Usability | WeBreakStuff, Bokardo, ParticleTree, Emily Chang |
| VC & Business | Jeff Clavier, Nivi |
| Podcasting | PodTech, Web 2.0 Show |
| Tech & Development | Programmable Web, CrunchNotes, Librarystuff |
| Commentary | Scripting News, HorsePigCow |
As Mike said, our goal is to provide a list of high quality blogs that are writing about Web 2.0 trends. OK it is an exclusive group, but we're not snobs :-) So if you think you have a high quality Web 2.0 site, or know of one, then feel free to contact us (details on the site). We continue to add blogs regularly and are working on a number of ways to make the content more accessible. We provide RSS feeds for each blog and an aggregated OPML feed for those of you who’d like to subscribe to all of them. We'll continue to add more functionality and are of course open to suggestions on how to improve the site.
Interesting little post from Jason Calacanis, who wrote:
"TIRED: Subscribing to Fred's blog: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/
WIRED: Subscribing to Fred's Del.icio.us feed: http://del.icio.us/rss/fredwilson
Note: On Bloglines Fred has 383 subscribers to his blog and 9 to his del.icio.us RSS feed... I prefer to read what Fred is *considering* blogging about :-)
Question: What's more interesting to you, a person's bookmarks or a person's blog?"
At least one person has said the same thing about my blog and del.icio.us feed, so this isn't to call out Fred's blog. In fact I read his blog avidly.
Last night I was IMing with a friend and we talked about my previous post The Second Coming of Content and RSS Feeds. Apparently it put my friend to sleep. I retorted that it is a profound post (I was trying to be witty, but I also believe it). OK the fact of the matter is, it is a post that takes time to absorb and a lot of people would consider it boring. Whereas my del.icio.us links are quick one-liners that are easy to absorb, although they don't have any depth. Apart from the odd haiku moment perhaps.
Another thing, have you noticed how few people add notes to their del.icio.us feeds? In their new re-design, del.icio.us has added more room for notes. Which is great for people like me, but I wonder why more people don't add at least one line of comment to their 'bookmarks'. Maybe because most people consider them actual bookmarks and not a mini-blog. Hmmm.
Ideally I want to insert my del.icio.us links into Read/WriteWeb, as a daily post. I've tried the stupidly named and poorly designed "add a new thingy" feature on del.icio.us before, but it wasn't good enough. How about fixing that up del.icio.us? Or what about Feedburner doing it? Or 43Things? Somebody help me add my del.icio.us links to my blog as a daily and chronological post :-)
Update: here are the things I want...
- a daily digest of my del.icio.us links added to my blog, both on the site and in my main R/WW RSS feed.
- I want to customize the heading of the daily digest (e.g. Richard's Web 2.0 Links).
- I want to select only certain tags to put in the digest - e.g. in my case I'd select http://del.icio.us/ricmac/web2.0
- I'd like the option of rolling a bunch of different feeds into my daily digest. e.g. del.icio.us web 2.0 tag, a Flickr feed, a 43Things feed.
- I want the daily digest to be inserted into my main R/WW content stream on the site - i.e. chronological and not a separate page or in the gutter block. The whole point here is that I want to integrate various feeds in my main content, chronologically.
So LazyWeb, I invoke thee. Please develop the above. Or maybe I'll have to do a Jason Kottke and develop it myself. But I don't really want to muck around with magpierss and all that. Besides, this would be a great feature for a lot of blogs.
Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo has just posted what I think is a milestone post for RSS and Web 2.0: How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued, and consumed. In it he expounds on the future direction of his company Feedburner, which I've long considered to be the leading company in the RSS Publishing space. (NB: this post is NOT about the other RSS news of the day, Microsoft's Simple Sharing Extensions. I'll address that in a separate post).
There are 3 themes in particular from Dick's post which grabbed my attention:
1) RSS feeds encompass much more than blogs now
2) Feed becomes input to content on the site
3) Focus on the feed item - attach threads to the item and track it across the Web while it gets remixed and re-published.
With regard to 1), many of us have been noticing the trend for RSS feeds to extend into non-blog content. 2005 has really been the year in which that trend has solidified, as Dick's venn diagram perfectly illustrates:
Graphic courtesy of
Feedburner
This is where it gets really interesting. Feeds becoming input to the website reminded me of Erik Benson and others' experiments with the Bloglines API back in February 2005. At that time, Erik re-modelled his whole blog so its content was entirely made up of inputs from his many feeds. He did that because his content was being published all over the Web - in del.icio.us, Flickr, 43Things, LiveJournal, other blogs. So feeds became his method for keeping track of all his content and bringing it all together.
It makes total sense for Feedburner to be right in the middle of this 'pulling together' of feeds from all over the place - and other feed input mechanisms. People like Erik have the programming knowledge to manage their feed 'inputs' this way, but the vast majority of people (like me) would rather a service like Feedburner did that work for us - via our Feedburner feed and some simple hook-ins to systems like Movable Type, Wordpress and Typepad.
Dave Winer recently pointed to a post by Adam Green, which explored similar territory. Adam thinks 2006 will be the year the Web explodes:
"The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website's content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a "place" where data "is" and other sites "point" to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why "go" to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream."
(emphasis mine)
His post specifically referenced Google, but I think this trend is much larger than even Google. The thing which is going to tie all this together is of course feeds. Mainly RSS, but perhaps Atom's much-vaunted extensibility will come into play too.
This gets to the heart of the matter and I think Feedburner is onto something big here. Feedburner now views the item (e.g. a single post from your blog, or a specific search result in a topic feed) as "the atomic unit of measure in the feed", which will in turn lead to Feedburner managing syndicated content "at a more atomic level by attaching 'threads' to the item." It reminded me of the Design for Data and "content will be more important than its container" themes I was big on at the end of last year and beginning of this (and which I will be re-focusing on now). Incidentally those R/WW posts from a year ago led to a collaboration with Joshua Porter on a Digital Web article, which led to an O'Reilly Media book contract. But I digress...
If you think about it, focusing on the feed item is a profound change in how we think about RSS feeds. Up till this year, most of us thought of RSS feeds as a way to subscribe to single sources of content. But over 2005 it's become apparent that content is being remixed, mashed up and re-published across many sources - leading to heated ethical debates over content rights and confusion amongst publishers on how to 'monetize' (sorry I can't help but use that word) their content. Fred Wilson had a nice post on this theme recently, entitled The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed).
Dan Saffer recently explored this issue from a different angle, a post entitled The Web 2.0 Experience Continuum. Dan's post is all about the need for a next-generation tool set to deal with what he calls semi-structured and unstructured Web experiences. He wrote:
"The tools we’ll use to find, read, filter, use, mix, remix, and connect us to the Internet will have to be smarter and do a lot more work than the ones we have now."
What he's referring to is at the aggregation and filtering level, whereas Feedburner is at the feed/item level. So I think there are opportunities for developers to create those Aggregation 2.0 tools, which will complement what Feedburner is in the middle of building.
Graphic courtesy of
Leigh Blackall
I've got my own ideas on what the next generation of Aggregator/Filter tools will look like, so perhaps I'll even get stuck in and try to build part of this vision out myself. Exciting times!
This week: Explaining Web 2.0 to normal people, Google Base, Yahoo Shoposhere, Amazon tags, Hypertext and the next 15 years.
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Two excellent posts this week on the topic of presenting Web 2.0 to 'normal' people (i.e. non-geeks). I myself did this a couple of weeks ago, when I did a presentation about Web 2.0 to a group of New Zealand Government managers. My approach was to present Web 2.0 in ways that might be familiar to them. So I used MyYahoo as a prime example (RSS, podcasts, user-generated content, etc), and also Flickr, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, BBC Backstage, and finally del.icio.us (at which point I finally cracked and admitted del.icio.us is "a bit geeky"). I also mentioned other staples like Google, eBay and Amazon.
Anyway, Matt McAlister had a great post this week entitled How to present Web 2.0 ideas that resonate with non-technical people. Apart from being the first person this year to invoke the Information Superhighway (a dubious honour?), Matt also noted that mashups is a concept that people can relate to.
My book co-author Joshua Porter also gave a talk during the week, entitled Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us. He's got a podcast of it available (60MB!). Josh focused on the concept of 'hacking' in his speech, noting: "I made the argument that the history of the Web was all about hacking, and that hacking is really the only way to innovate."
Google Base, a kind of classifieds service for anything and everything, was officially released this week and it got a mixed reception. Mike Arrington had the best headline of the week with this: Google Base Launched. Yuck. Others were also not impressed with the notion of a centralized database, including Bubblegum Generation and Yahooligan Alex Moskalyuk (who called Google Base "the Flickr of everything").
However in the end I was swayed by the long-term visions of Michael Parekh and Bill Burnham, who think Google is building a human directory layer on top of their machine-generated search results. As I concluded in my ZDNet blog:
Google Base may not be pretty to look at and it may be a centralized database, but the potential is there to turn it into a hugely valuable directory of structured content. Plus if they add APIs and start aggregating outside RSS feeds, then they could easily extend Google Base and remove the issues around it being a 'walled garden'.
Yahoo! released a shopping search and recommendations service early this week, called Shoposhere, and TechCrunch had the scoop:
"Yahoo is making a major push into search personalization and recommendations - the overall project is called “Shoposphere” and the major feature being released is called “Pick Lists“. Their goal is to move ecommerce towards what they call “me commerce”. Any registered Yahoo user can create a Pick List."
It has all the things you'd expect from a 2.0 service: RSS feeds, reviews, ratings, personalized lists, user profiles, sharing, comments, community. Tick all the boxes, Yahoo! is putting out some fine products these days.
Also released this week was Amazon's tagging, in which users will be able to apply tags to any item on the Amazon website. A user's tags will be collected under their profile. It took longer than expected for Amazon to introduce tagging, but then I can't think of many commercial websites as big as Amazon that do tagging - if you know of any, please leave a comment.
Alex Barnett has been pumping out some excellent posts over the past couple of months and this one in particular caught my eye: Hypertext and the next 15 years. Apart from introducing the witty phrase "loser-generated content" to our growing Web 2.0 lexicon, Alex makes 10 bold predictions for 2020. Here's my favourite prediction:
"Evolutionary algorithms powering the majority of successful businesses, e.g the #1 attention service and market-making software will be powered by algorithms that no-one created and that no-one can understand. Algorithms become the new Internet rockstars"
Hmmm, that may come true sooner than we think according to the UN's telecommunications agency :-0
That's a wrap for another week!
Serendipitously I came across a beautifully done multimedia montage of Web 2.0 on Flickr, by Leigh Blackall. The photos are stunning and Leigh has weaved Web 2.0 themes into all of them. Plus some of the slides have notes attached. Here are a few of the slides, but I recommend you flick through the whole set.
YAW2D = Yet Another Web 2.0 Definition. But this time it comes from Paul Graham, whose every essay is treated like a tablet from Moses by the Slashdot crowd.
Surprisingly, Paul Graham's essay entitled Web 2.0 is not a Naysayer one. It's critical of Web 2.0 in parts, but overall the essay is well thought out and offers weighty insights.
So how does Graham define Web 2.0?
"Ajax, democracy, and not dissing users."
What, that's it?! Well, it turns out Graham's essay illustrates the problem of trying to define Web 2.0: you can't, in a single sentence or paragraph that is. This extract is a good example of that:
"Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used. The "trends" we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble."
Of course that is just repeating what most of us 'Web 2.0 Wankers' have been saying for the past year, as is the rest of Paul Graham's essay. But for Graham to give this thing called Web 2.0 his Tech God blessing is a good thing.
I think he overdoes the Google = Web 2.0 theme, but hey we all have our biases.
From the Warning Label Generator (via Supr.c.ilio.us).
Harnessing collective intelligence in The Long Tail.
Don't say I didn't warn you ;-) Hey if Eran can be serious, I'm allowed to be silly every now and again. I will start writing proper posts again soon, I promise...
While pondering my Midblog Crisis, I remembered a fortune cookie I received during the spicy noodles dinner in Palo Alto on 12 October (when I was in the US for the Web 2.0 Conference). Present at the meal were Dave Winer, Mike Arrington, Fred Oliveira, Gabe Rivera and myself. At the end of the delicious meal, we all got a fortune cookie. Here's what mine said:
"Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril."
I thought it was quite appropriate then - and especially so now given my post yesterday about re-focusing my blog. btw thanks to the people who left encouraging comments on that post!
From left to right: Gabe, Dave, me, Mike, Fred
I miss Silicon Valley. But at least my blog is in the right place.
In the third and final part of my series of ZDNet columns about Yellowikis as a Web 2.0 case study, I look at some of the design principles that can be applied by other Web 2.0 companies and services.
Following is a summary of principles that Yellowikis demonstrated. Be sure to check out the whole series for full details: Part 1 - Introduction; Part 2 - Industry Disruption and The Competition; Part 3 - Demonstrating Web 2.0 Principles.
I intend to do more of these Web 2.0 Case Studies, it's been enjoyable and I've learnt a lot!
Forgive me, it's time for an introspective blog post. Lately I feel I've been in a bit of a blog slump with Read/WriteWeb. My numbers are still good, but I'm not happy with the quality of my recent posts here. I set very high standards for myself and I get disappointed when I don't meet them. Yesterday produced an example of what I consider a poor R/WW post: Gawker Strikes Deal With Yahoo. Admittedly it was a rushed post, because I had other things to do, but that's no excuse for not doing more groundwork and analysis before I posted it. By contrast, later that day I saw an excellent post by Mike Arrington from TechCrunch on the same topic: Is the Gawker-Yahoo Deal Important? Mike's post pointed out something that I would have known had I done more groundwork, that Yahoo is not actually linking through to Gawker sites. Mike also had new and useful analysis - and questions - about the Yahoo-Gawker deal.
I ended up emailing Mike and congratulating him on the post, which in my view is illustrative of the outstanding work he's doing with TechCrunch.com currently. TechCrunch is a valuable resource for people in our industry - and is being noted as such by people or sites I read and respect. My blog is hopefully a valuable resource too, but I need to return to doing the things that made it popular to begin with.
To find out what is really my niche, I decided to check what people have actually been reading from R/WW. Between 10 Oct 05 (when I first started using Measure Map) and 17 Nov 05, the following were my most visited posts:
1. Web 2.0 Office
(posted 2 Sep 05)
2. Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0
(posted 1 Nov 05)
3. Web 2.0 Workgroup
(posted 10 Oct 05)
4. craigslists gets heavy with Oodle
(posted 14 Oct 05)
5. Web 2.0 Definition and Tagging
(posted 1 Feb 05)
6. Portals 2.0 flesh out their product lines
(posted 10 Nov 05)
7. Microsoft Announces The Live Era
(posted 1 Nov 05)
8. Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 31 Oct - 6 Nov 2005
(posted 6 Nov 05)
9. My Million Dollar Blog
(posted 8 Oct 05)
10. Web 2.0 Naysaying reaches an all-time high (or is it low)
(posted 21 Oct 05)
Interesting that none of the above posts are "scoops" and only a couple are announcements or news. I would classify 6 of the above top 10 posts as true analysis of which I'm proud of - and 5 of those are in the top 6. I think this shows that my place in the tech blogosphere is as an analyst and commentator on Web 2.0 trends. I think I've been trying to do too many newsy type posts lately and focusing too much on getting onto tech.memeorandum.
In fact, it turns out I did get to the top of tech.memeorandum a couple of times with analytical posts that I didn't expect to make it there. Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0 and Portals 2.0 flesh out their product lines were both number 1 on the Top of the Meme Pops for a time. I think there's a lesson in that for me - just write well thought out and insightful posts and tech.meme will reward the best of them. I also have plans to start digging deeper with my analysis and use the products I'm talking about more thoroughly (hat tip Ben Barren for pushing me along in that respect).
Incidentally, my top 5 ZDNet posts at time of writing are:
Leaked Documents from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie
Microsoft's Ray Ozzie on the Web Office
Is digg the new Slashdot?
The Web-based Office will have its day
Personalized Start Pages: Microsoft, Google, Netvibes
Ray Ozzie: The Internet Services Disruption
My ZDNet readers like the techie posts and ones about Microsoft!
Anyway... I hope you don't mind this excursion into blog navel-gazing, but I felt like I needed to re-focus and get back on the track that made Read/WriteWeb a joy to write (and hopefully to read) to begin with. I'd really appreciate any comments - positive or negative - that you have about R/WW. What kind of things do you want me to deliver to you and where do you see the value (if any) of my blog?
