I've had enough of the hype. I've had enough of cynicism. I've had enough of hate blogs. The nail in the coffin was this post on ZDNet, by Russell Shaw. The thing is, I agree with Russell. The term 'Web 2.0' is distracting from the real value going on in the Web right now.
Read/WriteWeb will be focusing on more media-related web technology in 2006. Enough Web 2.0.
Ben Barren's written an excellent series of posts about his favorite features to flip. Here's his top ten:
#1 - Podcasting Ratings
#2 - Better Blogging Tools
#3 - MySpace meets Linkedin
#4 - Non-Text RSS Reader
#5 - RSS Search/Reader Attention Glue
#6 - Images for Adsense
#7 - Podcasting Creation Tool
#8 - Enterprise Vanity Search
#9 - Blog/RSS Syndication Tools
#10- Asia Pacific RSS/Blogging/Web 2.0
My personal favorite is number 10: Asia Pacific RSS/Blogging/Web 2.0. As Ben said:
"The Solution : Combination of Build and Import the best of Web 2.0 to Australia and AsiaPacific, dealing with only the best people. Order of Opportunity Rollout - RSS Search, RSS Reader, RSS Sharing, Web, Image + Video Tagging + Sharing, Local Communities and Meta-Classifieds Search. Region by Region : Aust/AsiaPac/UK...."
I've been talking with Ben about some of this, so expect interesting things to emerge in the new year. Remember this is the part of the world where Rupert Murdoch and Peter Jackson come from, so you know there's huge potential for innovation down under.
Only I for one won't be calling it Web 2.0 next year. That's so 2005...
The inventor of the World Wide Web is now blogging:
"In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute. The first browser was actually a browser/editor, which allowed one to edit any page, and save it back to the web if one had access rights. [...] Now in 2005, we have blogs and wikis, and the fact that they are so popular makes me feel I wasn't crazy to think people needed a creative space."
Needless to say, Tim Berners-Lee has been a huge influence on me. I pretty much named my blog after him. As I wrote in my very first blog entry on April 20, 2003:
"The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it. The web was never just supposed to be a one-way publishing system, but the first decade of the web has been dominated by a tool which has been read-only - the web browser. The goal now is to convert the web into a two-way system. Ordinary people should be able to write to the web, just as easily as they can browse and read it."
Welcome to the blogosphere, good sir. We wouldn't be here without your work.
Oh and of course: subscribed! ;-)
Here's the Top Ten web technology and new media memes, issues or news stories of the past week.
1. Yahoo buys del.icio.us. Yahoo! continues its buying spree of cool Web app companies, after also buying Flickr and konfabulator this year. Bubblegeneration had a nice summary: "Yahoo, I think, is rolling up social plays so it can basically do what I've outlined as the dominant Media 2.0 strategy: vertically integrate across the 2.0 value chain, with a focus on the edges."
2. Amazon announced the Alexa Web Search Platform, which provides public access to Alexa data along with computing and storage resources. I wrote about it here. Most bloggers were bullish about the news, but it remains to be seen what third party services are developed on top of Alexa's platform.
3. FeedBurner makes RSS interactive, with FeedFlare. A big step towards delivering decent functionality and interactivity to RSS feeds. It's significant because RSS is a far more important content 'container' these days than HTML.
4. Structured blogging arrives, with two new plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type. Phil Pearson rounded up all the action. Josh Porter also had an interesting take, which prompted Bob Wyman of PubSub to comment: "When Structured Blogging becomes the norm then we’ll have 'the semantic web.'".
5. Tagworld takes on MySpace - TechCrunch and Om Malik have the details. In a nutshell, Tagworld is focusing on music in an attempt to muscle in on MySpace's market share.
6. Global Voices Online Summit. Dina Mehta provided excellent coverage on this truly global blogging event. Also see a follow-up post from Dina, in which she talks about how an Israeli and Palestinian blogger sorted out some issues while at the summit. Inspiring stuff.
7. Google releases a Music Search, giving users links to song lyrics, music artists "popular in the U.S." and CD titles on the main search results page. Here is an example of a Google music search on my favorite band, The Velvet Underground.
8. Ryan Stewart, who works for the Learning Lab group at The Wharton School, wrote about how the Web is changing education: "To me, Web 2.0 isn't just about tagging and blogging, it's about really using the web to its fullest potential and changing whatever industry you're in. For us, it's changing the way students experience learning in the classroom."
9. TechCrunch thinks Writely is kicking a**. According to Mike, Writely continues to lead the pack in online ajax word products.
10. Yahoo joined forces with the Seven Network, one of Australia's leading television and media companies. Couple of interesting comments were left on my blog about that deal. In yet more Yahoo news, they announced a partnership this week with Six Apart to provide Movable Type hosting.
That's a wrap for another week!
Toni Schneider, who runs the Yahoo Developer Network, just announced the addition of JSON support for various Yahoo APIs and a new Javascript Developer Center. This is designed for people who "eat, sleep and breathe JavaScript" :-0.
JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. According to the Wikipedia entry, JSON's simplicity has "resulted in its widespread use, especially as an alternative to XML in Ajax".
I had the pleasure of speaking to Toni recently and I know the Yahoo folks have lots of plans around APIs. As Yahooligan Matt McAlister recently wrote in reference to a Scott Gatz speech: "Kevin Burton asked about public APIs. Scott pointed him to developer.yahoo.net where the current APIs are posted and some community efforts to help facilitate more activity. He said, Yahoo! is still testing some concepts, and the company knows that this is incredibly important. And Scott said we can expect to see a lot more in that area. "
I've just published a list of the top ten defining moments of Web 2.0 this year. Here's a taster, but please click through to ZDNet to read the whole post.
It's been a huge year for the Web! A time of renewed optimism in Silicon Valley and an incredible number of new web applications. In a sense it all started with Google's IPO in August 2004, the success of which was a positive and affirming lead-in to 2005. We then witnessed a renaissance of startup activity, acquisitions and intense VC interest in the Web throughout the year. Here then is my list of the top ten defining moments for the Web in 2005. [Full story on ZDNet...]
I'm keen to get your feedback on this, either here or at ZDNet. What were your top Web 2.0 moments of 2005?
Liked this quote from the recent Reuters Media and Advertising Summit in New York:
"The media plan of the future will look like the tiles of your bathroom floor ... a number of component pieces fitted together very precisely, but lots of pieces," said David Verklin, chief executive of media buyer Carat Americas.
Digging a bit more into that... in an article from late September Verklin outlined seven things marketers can do today to create the media plan of the future, including allocating "15 to 20 percent of your marketing budget to digital" (apparently it's about 5% today) and re-thinking the idea of reach. Virklin said "In the digital age, you need to manage thousands of small placements."
It's interesting how this theory of componentized media pieces meshes with Feedburner's quest to manage syndicated content at an atomic level. Thousands of small pieces of content / media, which need to be managed at both the technical level (ref: Feedburner) and marketing level (ref: Verklin).
Phil Pearson, Marc Canter and others have been burning the midnight candle getting Structured Blogging up and running. It's live now and Phil has a round-up of all the action. Structured blogging basically means publishing different kinds of information - like events, reviews and classified ads - in a 'structured' format, so that aggregators can pick up the data from all over the Web.
Thomas van der Wal thinks "it may be one of the brightest ideas of 2005" and Jeff Clavier has a good analysis: "This is a positive development for the industry, eventually pushing blogging into richer types of applications - and enabling new types of aggregation."
Structured blogging has been talked about for a wee while now and, as is usual in the RSS world, has had competing ideas and formats to deal with. But this latest development marks a milestone, because there are now Structured Blogging plugins available for the two main 'early adopter' blog platforms - MT and Wordpress. That's what Phil and a whole host of others (named in his post) have been working so hard on to release today.
With any luck, Structured Blogging will quickly gain some momentum due to the plugins - and before you know it will go mainstream. I'm expecting big things from this in 2006.
disclaimer: I do freelance work for BBM, where Marc and Phil work. But even so, Structured Blogging rocks!
Feedburner has integrated Web services with feeds, in a new product released just now called FeedFlare. I got a sneak preview of FeedFlare and it's currently activated in my RSS feed. You may have noticed some new active and contextual links at the bottom of each of my posts, in your RSS Aggregator. Things like 'Email this', 'Email the author', Technorati data, del.icio.us tags and an 'Add to del.icio.us' option. All links that add interactivity and social context to my feed.
What are the new features? Firstly here's a screenshot, taken from my Rojo account, that shows Feedflare in action. Notice the blue links at the bottom? Those are the FeedFlare links...
Wordpress users also get a 'Comments' link, showing how many comments each post has.
The reason I'm excited about this is because my feed gets around 5-6 times more coverage than my actual website these days. My feed is where the action is, not my site. So any way I can find to improve the user's experience and introduce more interactivity into my feed, I'm going to snap it up! If people are 5 times more likely to read my content in an RSS Aggregator than on my website, there's no use me fighting it - I have to start bringing functionality to my feed. That's what makes FeedFlare so promising.
In their press release, Feedburner called the FeedFlare links a "live thread" and a way of adding community and actions to a feed. This is part of Feedburner's current strategy to manage syndicated content "at a more atomic level". As Feedburner VP of business development Rick Klau said, FeedFlare allows publishers to "deliver meaningful interactivity along with content and further the two-way dialogue with their subscribers".
This is just the beginning too. Feedburner plans to roll out more features for FeedFlare, including a set of open APIs "to allow third-party developers to build and integrate custom FeedFlare services".
Congrats Feedburner on making exciting progress on RSS usability and functionality. I've felt for a while now that RSS is a first-class citizen of content publishing, arguably more important than HTML nowadays (according to my own blog stats anyway). So RSS feeds deserve first class functionality and interactivity too - and Feedburner is delivering it.
Update: See Feedburner's post about FeedFlare. TechCrunch has more details, including an interesting comments thread, and Fred Wilson relates it to his four rules for the future of media. All well worth reading.
John Battelle just posted that Amazon is opening up its Alexa search data and tools to the world! According to John, Alexa has about 5 billion documents in its index, which is about 100 terabytes of data. With this move anyone will be able to use Alexa's index to develop their own services. As John wrote:
"Anyone can also use Alexa's servers and processing power to mine its index to discover things - perhaps, to outsource the crawl needed to create a vertical search engine, for example. Or maybe to build new kinds of search engines entirely, or ...well, whatever creative folks can dream up. And then, anyone can run that new service on Alexa's (er...Amazon's) platform, should they wish."
Mashup heaven! Called the Alexa Web Search Platform, it will be available to use for quite reasonable fees. Will this make Amazon a major search player? Too early to tell, but it's certainly going to make Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft sit up and take notice of Amazon again.
TechCrunch and Dan Farber are also covering the story. More on this as it develops...
Update: alert ZDNet reader duncan12 tells us there are two distinct services: "The new service is called the Alexa Web Search Platform, websearch.alexa.com, not to be confused with the Alexa Web Information Service, aws.amazon.co/awis. The former provides developers programmatic access to Alexa Crawl and Infrastructure, while the latter is a Web service that allows developers to extract pre-processed data about Web sites."
I've updated my post accordingly. FYI...
The Alexa Web Search Platform "provides public access to the vast web crawl collected by Alexa Internet. Users can search and process billions of documents -- even create their own search engines -- using Alexa's search and publication tools. Alexa provides compute and storage resources that allow users to quickly process and store large amounts of web data. Users can view the results of their processes interactively, transfer the results to their home machine, or publish them as a new web service."
The Alexa Web Information Service (quoted in an earlier version of this post) is an existing service that "offers a platform for creating innovative web solutions and services based on Alexa's vast repository of information about the web. Developers, researchers, web site owners, and merchants can get information about Web sites, such as traffic data, contact info and related links, as well as an xml-based search engine and browse service, and incorporate them directly into their own Web sites or services."
Update 2: The Alexa Blog has posted about it: "Today, Alexa is releasing the Alexa Web Search Platform Beta (websearch.alexa.com), effectively opening up the Alexa Web Crawl and ushering in a new era where anybody can create new search services without having to invest millions of dollars in crawl, storage, processing, search and server technology."
I liked how TechDirt put it: "...hopefully it will nudge some of the search players into realizing that they can be much more powerful by turning themselves into platforms rather than destinations." Also Jeff Clavier notes: "Search engines indexes are one step closer of being a commodity - at least for the "Surface web" (as opposed to the Deep Web)."
Of course, the true test will be how many people actually use Alexa's Web Search Platform to create new and viable services. It's a bit like ning.com - it all sounds great in theory, but let's see what plays out in practice.
