ReadWriteWeb

Quote from Rod Drury, founder and CEO of kiwi web email company AfterMail (which was acquired by Quest Software for US$45 million in January 2006):

"We demonstrate globally from our office in Wellington, install our products remotely and receive funds electronically. We have US phone numbers in our office. The barriers to global commerce are minimal. We don't really even think about, we just do it."

New Zealand is a tiny country of just over 4 million people, on the other side of the world to the US and Europe. We've historically had a chip on our shoulder about the distance we are from all the action, but in recent times Internet technology has improved our lot. As the NZ National Library wrote, when explaining their Digital Strategy:

"For generations we have laboured under the real or imagined burden of 'the tyranny of distance'. With the Internet comes 'the death of distance'. A recent report noted that 'for New Zealand, the Internet is the modern equivalent of the freezer ship that revolutionised our economy last century'."

I share Rod's optimism about the Internet enabling us kiwis to earn a living virtually. Still, I would love to attend some of those TechCrunch parties, or be able to work at a big Internet company in Silicon Valley, or pop round to a local wifi-enabled coffee shop and write my book (there's no free wifi anywhere near where I live). I guess location still counts for something, huh... :-)

- The Return of Mr Safe (like a geeky version of Inspector Clouseau, Mr Safe is one of the enduring characters of the tech blogging world... in this latest episode he confronts his old foes Chief Inspector Funky and the evil Dr Fork)

- Stowe Boyd on Advisory Capital (instead of investing money, invest expertise -- obviously I like the sound of this concept! I'm available of course...)

- Can Yahoo do content? (ha, I first read the bit about Lloyd Braun's idea for a show anchored by animated puppets on Valleywag -- and thought it was just a joke. Turns out it was true!)

- Steve Rubel ranks the memetrackers (I don't put any stock into the findings, however the comments are interesting...)

- Flock Browser Gets an Update (cool, I can now import my bookmarks...)

- Employee Headcounts for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (includes Excel spreadsheet... not sure how much use the data is, but it sure is comprehensive)

- Five Reasons Web 2.0 and Enterprises Don't Mix (interesting article that challenges some of the assumptions that 2.0 technologies are a good fit for enterprise... a lot of the obstacles are office politics)

- Podbop wins best mashup award (at MashupCamp...Podbop combines concert events from eventful.com and mashes it with band sites that have downloadable music)

- Tom Foremski: Silicon Valley is back ("it is going to be about media technologies, it is all about publishing" -- absolutely!)

On my ZDNet blog, I've reviewed the best Web Office products currently on the market. I believe some of these may be acquisition targets for Microsoft, Google or even Yahoo - as the big companies roll out the inevitable Web Office Suite.

[Full story on ZDNet...]

- TechCrunch leads Silicon Valley Web renaissance (I miss the Gatsby mansion... fun times in Silicon Valley)

- Brian Oberkirch interviews Umair Haque (a nice Bubblegeneration 101 on Umair's theories, which you should take time to grok if you're in the new media business...)

- Media Investing's New Thing: Web2.0 ("Any traditional media company, with few exceptions, is being forced to make more difficult strategic decisions on how they move forward.")

- danah boyd: Identity Production in a Networked Culture (danah is the smartest person I know of when it comes to social networks and teens. In this essay/talk, she explores how teens are using MySpace.)

- Noah Brier: A Call for Unbundling ("After an inventory it's time to start assigning values and considering alternate forms of distribution.")

- Matthew Haughey on TV blogging ("Maybe stuff like clips on YouTube vs. regular format TV is kind of like how blogging was first viewed critically in 1999-2000.")

- Kanye West & Media 2.0 (it's all about the conversation...)

Flickr pic by Mike Arrington

- Amazon Plans Music Service To Rival iTunes (nice opportunity for server-->device integration here... among the plans: Amazon-branded portable music players for retailers and a subscription service)

- MySpace goes mobile (launching a mobile service that will let users read and post to the site for free)

- Alex Barnett screencast on 'Attention Engines' (this is very useful, especially if you're in the media business and want to see a comparison of the latest in Web-based news trackers)

- eBay's Gérald Rousselle reviews edgeio (comprehensive look at edgeio, the soon-to-be released online classifieds service run by Mike Arrington and Keith Teare)

- Rojo FeedShare ("a service that helps bloggers with similar interests promote each other." -- kind of like Adsense but you're advertising people)

- Tom's Future of Web Apps, Translated for Product Managers (heh, like Jeremy I too have had Tom Coates' awesome presentation open in my Firefox browser for the past few days...)

- Notes from recent Future of Web Apps Summit (great work Simon Willison, there is gold in them ther' notes!)

- Yahoo looking for semantic web developers (in the Media group too... I think the Web 2.0 'Web of Data' approach is slowly aligning with the Semantic Web... good news all round)

- Chinese president coming to Seattle, possibly Microsoft (Peter Jackson visited recently too...)

- Dave Sifry is proud of "brrreeeport" results (I see Supr.c.ilio.us is on the Valleywag payroll now... is this Snark 3.0?)

Flickr pic by Lisa in Germany

Excellent quote from Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us:

"Aggregation is often a focus of attention (latest, most active, etc.)

As the population gets larger, the bias drifts; del.icio.us/popular becomes less interesting to the original community members. Work out ways to let the system fragment in to different areas of attention."

This sums up why 2006 is for me The Year of the Filter, building on 2005's The Year of the Aggregator. Note that Joshua's wise words apply also to blogging in general, as well as to news tracking and those things currently being lumped under the moniker of Attention.

Fragment, Filter - two 'F' words to remember ;-)

NB: Flickr pic is by stripedmelon and is from a Foo Fighters concert last year, in my home town of Wellington New Zealand.

- The Evolution of Information Grazing (more cow metaphors)

- James plays the field ("Grazing, on the other hand, is feed promiscuity. No commitment.")

- Ross Levinsohn on Fox's Digital Charge (how the News Corp. media giant is working to build a broad online base)

- Dave Winer on professional media ("The pros are lazy, they aren't doing their job. Wish it weren't so.")

- Microsoft Shows How to Build Windows Live Services (lots of useful info here, including on Live.com's ambitious plans to be "the best RSS reader on the Web")

- Live.com product manager Sanaz Ahari on brand confusion with MSN and Live (Dare Obasanjo is at his best in the comments)

- Lucas Gonze discusses the Web Media Browser (a plugin for Yahoo Music Engine)

- Intro to Web 2.0 event in Ireland ("The Irish Internet Association and IrishDev.com hold their first joint-event of 2006, at the Morgan Hotel." 21 Feb)

- Aussie Web 2.0 event: Breakfast Bytes (8 March, Vibe Hotel, 111 Goulburn St, Sydney, Australia)

- Chuck Norris Facts 2.0 ("Chuck Norris does not build to flip. He builds to roundhouse kick to the face.")

Flickr pic by jennyromney

I've read some absurd things in my time, but this one really takes the cake. It's by a 'big media' guy at CBS News, who has written an astonishing spiel about what he regards as 'Web 2.0'. It's actually the first compelling thing I've read about Web 2.0 all year, but it was compelling because it was so hilarious. In one longish article, the writer Andrew Keen not only outlines his theory that Web 2.0 = Communism - he also manages to invoke Orwell and Franz Kafka too!! Now, I know I promised not to blog about Web 2.0 this year on Read/WriteWeb - but trust me, this article by Keen will have you rolling in the aisles. Here's an excerpt:

"Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the '60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google's Larry Page. Between the book-ends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris "Long Tail" Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle."

Now back to your regular scheduled blogging...

After my post about Personalized Megite, I got taken to task by both Gabe Rivera from Memeorandum and Nik Cubrilovic from OmniDrive - two developers who have had a lot of experience trying to develop such systems. As Gabe wrote in Scoble's comments:

"I agree with Nik that there’s a huge technical chasm to cross before a “personalized meme tracker” gets really useful. I think progress I make on the memeorandum engine is approaching that, but it’s still far off enough that I’ll pass on hyping it for now."

Gabe then proceeded to give me an earful in a Skype conversation about the issue ;-) I was also interested to read Greg Linden's thoughts on the matter, as he is another very smart developer with experience in this domain. Actually Greg seemed to like my suggestion of introducing clustering to Findory, which would definitely get me using it more. 

Because let's face it, Personalization + Clustering is the next big step in RSS. If 2005 was about Aggregation, then 2006 is all about Filtering.

Nik wrote up his thoughts today, in a post entitled Memetracking Attempts at Old Issues. While he mentions lack of link data as being an issue, it seems to me the crux of the problem is this:

"generating a personal view of the web for each and every person is computationally expensive and thus does not scale, at all."

He goes on to say that "this is why you don’t have personalized Google results – we just don’t have the CPU cycles to care about you."

So it's mainly a computational and scaling problem. Damn hardware.

Nevertheless, there is a big demand for personalized clustering - among the edge cases, it must be said. And Megite and TailRank are both trying to capture that demand, which to be frank I'm very pleased about. I understand why Gabe and Nik don't want a bar of it, but there are lots of squeezed bloggers out there who are desperate for a good RSS filtering solution. The first web app that solves this, or at least gives me decent filtered RSS feeds, is going to get my business for sure.

- The Trendiest Web2.0 Page on the Net! (it's funny cause it's true... apologies to Fred, who for all I know may've invented the 'big red jagged circle' effect)

- 'Future of Web Apps' slides... (beautifully designed presentation from Tom Coates, with brilliant content to match. A 'must read' if you're into Design for Data stuff - and I am big time...)

- The Media Day of a Millennial (NYTimes graphic that accompanied a story a month ago on "the millennial generation" - those born between 1980-2000)

- The blog power law gets the glossy magazine treatment ("The age of the blog moguls is here. For Pete Rojas, blogging paid off handsomely.")

- Marc Canter's vision of DLAs is becoming reality ("is it me - or am I seeing tons of DLAs emerging all over the place?" -- DLA = Digital Lifestyle Aggregator; and disclaimer: I do some work for Marc)

- Yahoo! Open Sources UIs and Design Patterns (under BSD and Creative Commons licenses - nicely done Yahoo! More info at the Yahoo UI Blog)

- More from Nik Cubrilovic on the IE threat to Firefox (see also my ZDNet post, in which I hark back to 1997 when Netscape lost the plot)

- John Musser on cross-platform API portability (e.g. chicagocrime.org runs on the Google Maps API, but has created a backup running on Microsoft’s mapping platform... just in case)

- Kareem: Big Media looking for Creative Technologists (Oooh, oooh -- pick me, pick me!!!)