Joshua Porter has written a nice balanced introduction to Web 2.0 on Squidoo.
Meanwhile I'm having a running battle with some idiots on the Wikipedia Web 2.0 page. One or more of these clowns keeps deleting any and all references to my websites and articles. Now I know what Dave Winer feels like when he criticizes Wikipedia. It's a great resource, but just like anything - a few idiots always end up ruining it for the rest of us.
I've noticed some excellent techie posts lately, so I feel duty-bound to point them out.
Phil Pearson, XML expert Kimbro Staken and Movable Type consultant Chad Everett have been working on a Structured Blogging plugin for Wordpress and MT. This is to enable ordinary folks (like me) to publish "new microcontent types, support microformats and other standards like Media RSS". Phil's looking for feedback, so if you're technically inclined jump over to his blog and add your 2 cents.
Also I found a great resource via the 9rules homepage, an article at Fiftyfoureleven.com about how to use the Yahoo! API. As it states in the intro:
"Looking at Yahoo!s APIs, you can see a little of that "openess" that Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel referred to at 2005's Web 2.0 conference. From images to movies to maps and search, they offer a lot of data through their APIs."
Fiftyfoureleven.com also offers an ongoing API series. Great stuff and I'll be reading this very closely and experimenting when I get some free time (in about a week!). Also check out ProgrammableWeb's How to Make Your Own Web Mashup article. The beauty of mashups is that anyone can play, thanks to great resources like these and the backend work of folks like Phil Pearson.
It's that time of year when everyone brings out their Best Of 2005 and Top Ten lists. I wrote a post this time last year entitled Best Web 2.0 Companies of 2004. It didn't get much of a response, because it was well before the Web 2.0 hype kicked in. Over the past couple of weeks Mike Arrington from TechCrunch and I have been compiling a follow-up to my inaugural Web 2.0 Best Of, which we plan to publish this week. In the meantime it looks like Dion Hinchcliffe has beaten us to the punch and released his own Best Of list. Fair play, the Web 2.0 blogging market is no longer as empty as it was last year when I posted my 2004 list :-) So go read Dion's list, but also remember to check out good old Read/WriteWeb and TechCrunch this week for our take on the year past. I'll also have a Top Ten list coming out on my ZDNet blog and perhaps a 2006 predictions post. I'm eagerly awaiting John Battelle's predictions for 2006. I recall printing them out last year, they were that good.
Oh and last year I chose Google as Best Web 2.0 Bigco of 2004, Ludicorp as Best Smallco, Feedburner as Most Promising. Things have changed a lot this year, since Web 2.0 has hit the big time (and my blog with it). There's a lot more competition, which makes for an interesting selection process. Stay tuned :-) Tis the season...
Yahoo! has joined forces with the Seven Network, one of Australia's leading television and media companies. A new 50-50 holding company will be formed that will own Yahoo Australia & NZ and operate under a new name, to be announced in January. A PDF presentation about the deal is here, which states (among other things) that Seven and Yahoo! "will use this vehicle as the exclusive online and mobile platform in Australian and NZ." See also paidcontent.org's take on the news.
At first glance this is a straight forward business deal combining Yahoo!'s global search and technology platform with Seven's localized "rich media and entertainment content". I wonder though if this is a test case for Yahoo's future media plans, signaling bigger things to come. Is a major deal with a US television network on the cards in 2006? Stranger things have happened - i.e. Time Warner's tumultuous marriage to AOL.
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel was quoted in the press release:
"Yahoo! and Seven have very complementary businesses and brands, and we see this as a tremendous opportunity to build a leadership position in Australia. This is the best combination to benefit from increased broadband penetration, rich media consumption, and the growing cross-media advertising spend. Together, I believe we can deliver the most engaging and innovative rich media experience for Australian audiences and advertisers."
Look for more Internet-bigmedia marriages in 2006 - rich media will be huge next year I believe. Let's hope such deals will be more successful than Time Warner and AOL, who ended up sleeping in separate bedrooms.
As TechCrunch reported, Joshua Schachter has announced the sale of Del.icio.us to (who else) Yahoo. Personally I'm thrilled Yahoo got del.icio.us, but I'm hoping they don't make it into a walled garden like they did with the My Web 2.0 product. Currently a user can export their data from del.icio.us, but they can't do that from My Web 2.0. I've written many times about this issue - I've even emailed My Web 2.0 senior managers, urging them to open it up. But still it remains a closed property… not very Web 2.0 :-( So I hope Yahoo doesn't ruin a good thing and close off del.icio.us. I'm sure they won't. More details on my ZDNet blog.
Here's the Top Ten Web 2.0 memes, issues or news stories of the past week, as judged by me.
1. Lightnet: open up your media, the Lightnet revolution is here. Lucas Gonze is leading the charge of the lightnet brigade: "The strength of lightnet is that everybody who's not a media incumbent wants it, and that's more than enough creative energy to do the job."
2. Jeremy Wright: Web 2.0 Companies NEED To Scale... posted just before he reported his own company B5 Media was having "uptime issues". Which proves that Web 2.0 people do have a sense of irony after all. Also check out the comments thread in Om Malik's post on the subject of scalability, together with my post on ZDNet.
3. Adam Curry impeached (or something apparently as serious): Ben Barren had the best post I read on the Curry Wikipedia scandel. Admittedly I only read one post about it.
4. The Yahoo product blitz continues, with Messenger with Voice and Answers. See also Om Malik's excellent post Tripping the Yahoo Fantastic. Very poetic: "At the end of the day, as I waited for my cab, the crowds still bustled around me. Around somewhere in my tired brain, a though rattled, just like me, Yahoo was waiting. I just can’t say for what or for whom…."
5. Mike Arrington continues his journey to find the flickr of videos, by reviewing Grouper. Just as Daisy was Gatsby's elusive dream, the flickr of videos is Mike's. In 20 years time it'll be seen as a classic Web 2.0 story...
6. PCWorld.com - The 100 Best Products of 2005. If you manage to see past the pop-up adverts, you'll note that Firefox was number 1 and Gmail runner-up. Apple Tiger OS was third.
7. VentureBlog: Social Networks 3.0. Quote: "...entrepreneurs have come to realize that social networks are enablers of other compelling consumer experiences." Or put another way, the best way to run an SNS these days is to offer users utility. I recommend reading Jeff Clavier's wonderful post a month or so ago, about Facebook, for an illustration of this.
8. Bubblegeneration: Media 1.0 and Coordination Arbitrage. The economics in Umair's posts often goes over my head, but I loved this line: "My kid sister is young enough to think that MySpace is corporate and lame. How do you think her generation is going to express and define itself?"
9. RSS Fund Makes 1st Investment. Private equity fund RSS Investors made a $9-million investment round in Attensa, an RSS Reader for MS Outlook. Also read Randy Charles Morin's interview with Jim Moore, an RSS Investor partner: "Within the next 18 months more than 110 million desktops will be fully RSS-oriented, simply through the distribution of Microsoft Vista."
10. Six Apart chief's 'nice' speech ends in name-calling. Folks, this is a 'story' that should've been a Register exclusive (and ignored by all sensible people). Sigh, I despair sometimes for the blogosphere... more fodder for Nicholas Carr.
That's a wrap for another week!
Fred Wilson has been thinking about the Web as a Platform concept. Like me, Fred sees this phrase as central to understanding the current era of the Web - known as Web 2.0. I liked how he put it:
"I believe the web is a platform. And that everything we need for an open ad market, or an open data architecture, or frankly most anything else, is available on the "web platform" today."
The reason I like that rough definition is it recognizes that content, media, markets, social apps - and lots of other things - are being built on the Web today. Too often people equate the Web as Platform idea to new software built with AJAX. I won't bring out the rather lame 'Web 2.0 is about people' line, but I will say that the Web is a platform for many more things than just software. Look at the Web innovation happening in libraries, as just one example.
Delving into the Web as Platform... I'm in the middle of exploring mashups - of all forms - and data models. I haven't written much about it yet in R/WW, because I've been busy doing and studying (and working!). But sooner or later an outpouring of blogging will occur on R/WW around these themes :-) In the meantime, I want to highlight a comment left by Ramana Kovi in Fred's post. Ramana made a valiant attempt at categorizing the 'Web as Platform' concept. He is building a DLA platform of his own called ePlatform, so he has probably thought a lot about this.
Ramana puts Web platform vendors into the following categories:
Core services
1. Authentication system (e.g. SXIP, Passport)
2. Payment System ( e.g. Paypal)
3. Reputation System ( e.g. Opinity)
4. Credit/Risk Management System (Dun & Bradstreet/FICO )
5. ...
6. .....
Data services
1. Product Catalog Services ( e.g. Amazon/iTunes etc)
2. Mapping services ( Google/Yahoo/MSN/Map quest)
3. News services ( Reuters/AP)
4. Ad Network ( Adword)
5. ...
6. ….
3. Communication/Collaboration Services
1. E-Mail
2. Calendar & Messaging
3. Blogs
4. Wikis
5. Social networks
6. ....
I think this is a very useful way of looking at the 'Web as Platform' concept (aka Web 2.0). How about we make an attempt here on my blog to fill out Ramana's categories. I'm going to think about the Data Services in particular. Please add to the above list started by Ramana in the comments below. I'll do an update post in a few days with a complete list, provided I get a good response. I'll be adding things too in the comments (right now I have to get back to my paid work!).
The Wall St Journal has a great write-up of Gabe Rivera's tech.memeorandum, although tragically the WSJ misspelled the link! I also enjoyed the comparison made between Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and The Great Gatsby:
"Consider a blog like TechCrunch, which chronicles the new breed of Internet start-ups known as Web 2.0 companies. The blogger behind it, Michael Arrington, is sufficiently influential that entrepreneurs in search of a write-up will make pilgrimages to his house to give product demos.
The fond hope of these entrepreneurs is that among his 12,000 readers will be a venture capitalist or (better yet) someone with a checkbook at Google or Yahoo. (Companies can be born, hire executives, unveil technology and get acquired without ever leaving this closed community.) And Mr. Arrington also has the social standing to be able to throw big Gatsby-like parties for as many of the 12,000 as were able to find out they were taking place and cared to show up."
The Great Gatbsy was one of my favorite books back in University, where I studied it in my American Literature course. The comparison is unfair in some respects, but in terms of Mike being the hub of Silicon Valley in this Web 2.0 era - as Gatsby was (fictionally) in the Jazz era - it has a certain literary appeal. Especially as I had the pleasure of being a guest in the Arrington mansion for two weeks in October.
From ch 3 of The Great Gatsby:
"There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before."
Lucas Gonze has been evangelizing a concept called lightnet. He coined the term, based on a recent Alex Barnett post entitled Hypertext and the next 15 years. Check out Lucas' del.icio.us page full of lightnet links. So what is lightnet? It took me a bit of clicking around to grok it, but basically it's the Two-Way Web for rich media.
As Jon Udell wrote, lightnet is "the antithesis of the walled-garden darknet". The term darknet comes from the JD Lasica book.
Lucas wrote me an email to tell me how lightnet intersects with Web 2.0. I'm sure he won't mind me quoting this bit:
"...the benefits of web 2.0 can accrue to audio and video just as much as to web pages and feeds. For example, webjay-ish URL playlists are remixes in the web 2.0 sense..."
I couldn't agree more and I fully support the opening up of rich media to allow remixes - and other forms of 'user' creation.
The Lightnet Tron, c/o daysofleisure.com:
Summary: For my blog, RSS is a much more important content format than HTML these days. In one of my posts, five and a half times more important!
Darren Rowse writes that Page Views per user for blogs is on average relatively low - less than 2 pages per visit. After a bit of research Darren came up with the figure of 1.7 Page Views per visitor for the average blog. I looked at my own stats and found that my Page Views per Unique Visitor was a lowly 1.4 (yikes!) last month. As Darren noted, the average blog reader looks at less than two pages per visit. If you look at our old friend Alexa, you'll see that most of the top websites in the world have high Page Views/Visitor numbers - i.e. they're "sticky" to use an old 1.0 term. The world's most popular website, Yahoo!, has a whopping 16.6 Page Views per user.
I've done a lot of research using Alexa over the past 6 months or so and I know that most good web sites average around 4-5 Page Views per user. So blogs are definitely below average, compared to more traditional websites. That's to be expected really, because RSS has become the method of both delivery and reading blog content. Especially so for a blog like mine, which offers a full-content RSS feed and is mostly read within RSS Aggregators. That doesn't worry me (quite the contrary), although it does mean I earn less revenue from ads on my site.
I was discussing RSS page views with someone last week, so I decided to compare the RSS and HTML page views from a single post of mine - Portals 2.0 flesh out their product lines. According to Feedburner Pro, that item was viewed 4884 times in my RSS feed over the past 30 days. Looking at the same post in MeasureMap (which btw is almost unusable currently due to extremely slow downloads!) it's been viewed 876 times on my website over the past 30 days. So with that rough calculation, my posts are viewed 5.5 times more via RSS than on the website! I'll do more analysis when I get time, but even this small example proves that RSS is a much more important content format than HTML these days, for my blog. I'd be interested in knowing if this is the case for other blogs.
