-
Apples rolls out new Intel Mac Minis, iPod Hi-Fi (the iPod Hi-Fi described by Steve
Jobs as "a home stereo reinvented [...] for the iPod age")
- MediaPost: Mainstream Media Warms To 'Web 2.0' (WashingtonPost guy: "We're trying to lengthen the interaction between reader and content." NYTimes calls it a "nexus of content and community")
- BubbleGen on tools and audiences (Umair says WSJ, WaPo, NYT and Economist audiences could give him content of relevance and depth, but they haven't been given the tools to connect and create)
- Can MySpace be Beaten? (great analysis on how MySpace/News Corp has "essentially captured the entirety of Americas youth" (!). Also check out Marc Canter's response, in which he says open standards could be the answer)
- BusinessWeek on social networking systems (thinks niche-oriented networks is the future, because " advertisers may have an easier time reaching such a targeted audience.")
- Here Come the Edge Aggregators! (interesting overview from Pete Cashmore of some of the other 'edge aggregators' out there, apart from edgeio)
- Jason Fried on Web 2.0 thinking ("It’s about value — something the new web set seems afraid to 1. create, and 2. charge for.")
- Union Square Ventures: Web services and devices ("When web services integrate with devices in a open architecture, we believe that the consumers' interest in innovation and integration will trump the vendors' interest in preserving control over limited proprietary channels.")
- Kevin Marks on Internet generations ("My generation draws the Internet as a cloud that connects everyone; the younger generation experiences it as oxygen that supports their digital lives." -- via Susan Mernit)
Flickr pic by berbercarpet
On ZDNet I've just posted a lengthy analysis of the main Ajax homepages (aka personalized start pages):
Over the past year many new AJAX homepages, aka personalized start pages, have been introduced to the market. Microsoft and Google have offerings, as do a host of small startups. First I'll define what an AJAX homepage is, then I'll do a feature comparison between the leading services....
Feedburner's just released a pretty significant upgrade to their service, including a new "Feed Stats Dashboard" and some much needed drill-down stats on individual posts. TechCrunch has the early scoop as well.
The best new feature for me is the feed item stats, so I'll start with that. Now you can see what percentage of your subscribers clicked on any one of your items. Also how many people actually looked at the post in their RSS Reader. Feedburner's Dick Costolo said they hope to spend a lot more time on this - what they call "reach" - based on how people react to it.
According to Dick other new features are:
- Uncommon uses. Feedburner tracks over 200k feeds and when a feed is referenced or clicked that Feedburner doesn't recognize as a "common reference", they highlight it in the dashboard and on the detailed uncommon uses page. You then have the option of "whitelisting" or "hiding" such references.
- Historical reach and subscription from the dashboard. You can now click back through the days on the dashboard chart to see reach and item popularity by day. This reminds me of Measure Map (recently bought by Google), except for feeds instead of web page views. I love those stats from Measure Map, so having them for feeds will be even better!
- Podcasters get better feed level download tracking. In addition to subscribers Feedburner now identifies the number of people that actually downloaded a particular podcast.
So all in all some excellent new functionality and I'm particularly pleased that I can finally analyze my individual RSS feed items (posts) much more thoroughly.
I've been tracking the development of all the personalized start pages that have flowered up over the past year. Live.com, Google Personalized Homepage, Netvibes, PageFlakes, et al. These are services that don't just offer a place to store all your content and links - but house your widgets, gadgets and web services too. I'll be publishing an analysis of the feature sets of the leading services on ZDNet tonight, but I want to set the scene by discussing their growing popularity - which makes for an obvious comparison to portals in the late 90's.
TechCrunch calls them AJAX homepages, because they all use AJAX in the UI. For that reason there's something uniquely 'Web 2.0' about personalized start pages. But in other ways, they harken back to the dot com era when portals were all the rage (Excite, AltaVista, Lycos, etc). For example, the main aim of the game is still getting traffic.
Looking at the 2006 class of portals/personalized pages, there are two distinct groups:
1) The big guns: Microsoft (live.com), Google (Google Personalized Homepage) and Yahoo (My Yahoo, which is still mostly an old-style portal).
2) The little companies: Netvibes, Protopage, PageFlakes and a host of other contenders which I'll mention in my ZDNet post.
In terms of traffic, it's difficult to gauge how the big guns compare to one another. But amongst the little guys Netvibes has been getting all the buzz and early traffic, as this Alexa chart shows:
To put that into perspective though, it's small potatoes compared to live.com:
Update: A source at Microsoft tells me that the Live.com figure on Alexa may include mail.live.com, which gets a lot of traffic. If that's the case, take the following paragraph with a grain of salt...
I added the top web-based RSS Reader Bloglines into the chart to show just how significant Live.com - and Personalized start pages in general - are becoming. Bloglines smokes every other web-based RSS Reader and has been no slug in traffic growth lately, yet it was overtaken in traffic by Live.com after just 1-2 months. In fact Live.com currently has double the amount of traffic of Bloglines! I would imagine Google isn't too far behind Live.com either.
It goes to show how valuable this type of service could be, in terms of traffic and being a 'start page' for users. More grist for the Portals 2.0 mill, because portals too were all about getting 'eyeballs' and traffic.
Incidentally, I have a question for you: where is Yahoo in all this? My Yahoo is more like a dot com portal than a Personalized start page. Aside from the obvious observation that My Yahoo isn't made of AJAX, it's still basically a portal for mostly static content. Yahoo owns one of the leading widget makers, konfabulator (now known as Yahoo! Widgets), but it's not integrated with My Yahoo. Why haven't they joined the 'AJAX homepages' party yet?
UPDATE: I've now posted an Ajax homepages market review on ZDNet.
Seems reporting new media news gets a bit dreary sometimes. This
from
PaidContent.org:
"BlogMedia Acquires The Blog Herald [by rafat] : Blog blog blog blog blag blag blah...blah. [by rafat] [Feb.27, 06]"
I have to admit, the press release Rafat linked to made me yawn too. Oh well, at least the blogosphere isn't talking about blogging again... what!? oh.
Flickr pic by lovevita22.
Online classifieds service edgeio just launched. I tested the service out recently and on ZDNet I've posted my thoughts.
I love the concept of edgeio, because it's almost exactly the same ideal as the Structured Blogging initiative. Structured blogging 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. In fact, at the bottom of the structuredBlogging.org homepage is a pretty good description of what edgeio does!
"Now anyone can build applications or services based on the structure of an entry. Using Structured Blogging, [...] buyers and sellers of goods can publish what they want to buy or sell and have those posts searched and listed by any number of search services."
Replace "any number of search services" with the word "edgeio" - that's what edgeio is about.
Summary: While full-text feeds are under-valued today, they will be an integral part of the content ecosystem in the near future. And that's when their true value will be recognized.
James Gross from the Feedster blog has an interesting post about how full-text feeds will provide much more value in future than today:
"What has been unfair for bloggers, or anyone publishing a feed, is the ability to capture the value of a published feed. What writer for a print newspaper can say that they have 10,700 readers to their article on page 14 of section c every day? That is what Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web can justifiably say everyday about his blog article on his full text feed. Maybe the number isn’t perfect, but the principle is, and having a one to one relationship between publisher and reader is what any ad agency should be looking for. This relationship is not valued correctly and probably won’t be for awhile, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t participate. Markets tend to work themselves out; disruptive technologies simply take a little longer."
I agree with James that my full-text feed is under-valued by the current blogging system. Currently I put no ads in my RSS feed on Read/WriteWeb, although clearly if I wanted to maximize what little revenue I make from Read/WriteWeb - then I'd put ads in my feed. I don't for two reasons:
1) Too many people still don't like ads in their RSS feeds and so they will squawk loudly about any publisher that has the temerity to put ads in their feed.
2) Even if I do put ads in my RSS feed, the returns aren't yet good enough. As I've written before, the pay-per-click model just doesn't work for RSS advertising (people have enough trouble clicking on actual story links in their RSS Aggregators, let alone clicking on adverts!). The CPM model (cost per 1,000 impressions) is better for RSS and is what services like Feedburner, Pheedo and Nooked are experimenting with currently. But CPM is by no means perfect. As James says, the industry hasn't yet worked out how to properly value full-text feeds.
Personally I think we need something like a CPbM model (Cost Per Branded Impression, a term which I just made up...). And this appears to be reinforced by Feedburner data:
"How RSS ads should best be targeted was something else Feedburner considered in its testing. It found readers psychologically associated an ad with the individual post in which it appeared. On a site, the ad is usually considered part of the site as a whole. [but] Posts are often too short to provide enough information about the proper context. One answer may be to use the overall site content, rather than individual post content, as a basis for targeting."
(emphasis mine)
In my weird lexicon, CPbM = Cost Per Branded Impression = the value of your "overall site content" together with how many impressions per post.
Why did I equate branding with content? Because how else can your brand value be formulated, when there is little visual design in your full-text RSS feed. Your content is your brand - and will increasingly be so in the 'Web 2.0' world. This is something I'm exploring in the book I'm co-writing - how the brand of a site these days is much more about content than about visual design.
As for how that will be monetized, well I haven't worked that out yet :-)
Publishing full-text RSS provides value today in two ways:
1) Reader convenience
2) It optimizes the chances of you being read - and syndicated as widely as possible (within the terms of whatever copyright license you have, of course)
And as James says, "efficent monetization will come in time". If I have any say in the matter, it'll be monetized according to the brand value of a feed.
James also brings up another great point:
"Increasingly blogs, as text, are becoming a smaller percentage of feeds overall. Look to photos, voice, video, newsletters, social networks, traffic alerts, etc. to make up a more substantial percentage of the overall mix."
This is a trend that I've been tracking for some time - e.g. my post from January 2005 entitled Why Topic/Tag/Remix Feeds Are The Future of RSS. It looks like 2006 will be the year when this trend finally kicks in. Indeed Paul Kedrosky quotes an unnamed source about Yahoo:
"According to Yahoo stats, only one of the top 20 most popular RSS feeds that My Yahoo subscribers are adding to their page is a blog."
That may just mean that mainstream media feeds make up the majority of the top 20 feeds that My Yahoo tracks. Which in itself is an interesting stat - I've emailed Yahoo to try and get confirmation of Paul's post. But it's also a pointer to the future of feeds, when the most popular feeds will be things like weather feeds, keyword-tracking, traffic alerts, etc.
OR, as I've been trying to find a way to say for a while, it may mean that the future of blogs isn't so much people subscribing to full text feeds of individual blogs. But people subscribing to amalgamated feeds of more than one blog, or mixed-author 'on the fly' feeds that have a limited shelf life. In that scenario of course, the full-text feed becomes an integral part of the system. Because if you don't publish your full content in your feed, you will miss out on all the remix and topic-focused feed action.
Of one thing I'm convinced: full-text feeds will be where the value resides in the near future. If you're still publishing excerpts then, your brand will be living on borrowed time.
- Erik Benson goes "old man
grey" (I knew he was wise beyond his years...)
- Kevin Roberts' Sisomo (leading edge kiwi wows the marketing/advertising world again with a beautifully designed site about his 'Sisomo' concept -- "the story of sight, sound and motion")
- The Future of Web Apps podcasts available now (this will keep my ears busy for a while...)
- Is MySpace.com Really That Popular? ("...despite having large numbers of registered users, only a portion of those are active participants on the site.")
- Umair: Why is the Valley Afraid of MySpace? ("The challenge, of course, is for geeks to understand that it's exactly this value equation they should be disrupting, not ignoring: making marketing, branding, advertising not evil.")
- Commenter on Umair's site about why MySpace got popular ("All this talk about MySpace lately. As someone who was part of the Los Angeles indie music scene that is now credited with making MySpace cool, I can tell you it was all about hooking up.")
- Greg Yardly on why Yahoo's social media pyramid is wrong ("To compete, Yahoo’s new services need 90% creators, not 1% or 10%." -- note that Bradley Horowitz pops up in the comments to say he agrees.)
- Pete Cashmore on Edge Feeders (points to FeedXS as an early example of a service that creates RSS feeds on the fly -- i.e. feeds are created and consumed as easily as reading something on the Web)
- Scott Karp: Audiences are not created equal ("Old Media has the audiences, but doesn’t know what to do with them. New Media knows what to do, but doesn’t have the audiences.")
Flickr pic by Erik Benson
When my post about Web Office Suite products got Slashdotted, one of the main issues amongst Slashdot commenters was: why do we even need a Web Office? This comment by Eightyford put it best:
"What are the advantages of having an online Office Suite? I'd say that the disadvantages include: security issues, slow speed, dependance on internet connection, limited features, harder to program, and probably many others. What is the point?"
It's a very good question and in my latest ZDNet post I try to answer it.
