Continuing my
look at Microcontent
Aggregators, Peoplefeeds is right up there
with 43Things.com as a leader in this market. Before I
start the review, I came across a new Web 2.0 list today called categoriz - which puts Peoplefeeds in its 'Content
Management' category and the others I've been tracking in categories such as 'Social
Networking' and 'RSS creation, reader'. Which is to say that categorizing Web 2.0
products is often as difficult as trying to define 'Web 2.0' itself (something I gave up
trying to do at the end of last year -
and I'm now much saner for it!). But to be clear, the type of product I'm looking at here
is:
a service that aggregates microcontent about a person (usually via RSS) and displays it on a new page/site for users to view in aggregate.
Peoplefeeds aggregates content from a variety of sources - a person's blog(s), Flickr feed, del.icio.us links and so on. They call this "personal content aggregation". Peoplefeeds also enables "discovery of other people's personal content" - and as with 43Things, users can filter that content.
Peoplefeeds has a nice concept called "watchlists", which allows you to subscribe to all - or just parts - of a person's content. You can filter what content you want to subscribe to - so e.g. you can choose to filter out a person's photos if you don't want to see their holiday snaps. But the real beauty of the Peoplefeeds system is that it allows you to filter content by tag. So if you're only interested in reading my content about Web Office, you can do so (provided I've tagged it as such - more on that in a moment). Here's a couple of screenshots illustrating the watchlist features:
This page shows my content that is tagged "WebOffice" across any of my sources. People
can subscribe to it using the +W button (next to the RSS button).
Here's an example of Bosko's Watchlist - e.g. he's subscribed only to BlueCockatoo's
content that is tagged "collaboration" and "development".
Theoretically then, it would be possible to only subscribe to a person's content on a single topic - no matter where they publish it to. For example, I post about Web Office mainly on my ZDNet blog, but occasionally on Read/WriteWeb. I may also decide to tag things in del.icio.us and Flickr with "WebOffice". So it's possible to use PeopleFeeds to filter all of those sources so you only get my content on the topic of Web Office - on one page and in one feed.
But here's the problem - this system is reliant on the publisher correctly tagging their content. I'm one of those 'lazy taggers', so often I'll forget to tag my content. I'm also a lapsed del.icio.us user (Web 2.0 father, forgive my sins...).
Peoplefeeds has other goodies such as OPML support and RSS feeds for nearly everything. I'm told an API is on its way too. I like how developer Bosko Milekic summed up Peoplefeeds in an email to me:
"The most important idea behind Peoplefeeds was to use personal/generated (i.e., "write") content to improve the "read" (consumption) experience, and filtering is a big part of that."
...gee I wonder why that description appealed to me ;-) All in all, Peoplefeeds is a nicely designed service with a lot of potential - particularly in the filtering aspects. I suspect it's a bit ahead of its market right now and there is a concern about whether the system is too reliant on publishers tagging their content correctly. It would be even more impressive if Peoplefeeds had some keyword-matching algorithm to identify terms like "Web Office" across my feeds, instead of relying on me (the publisher) tagging it. In other words, get the system to automate some of those tagging/filtering tasks. Let's hope that kind of functionality will come, because Peoplefeeds is something I'd like to use more.
I've been writing a lot recently on the topic of Web Office, over at my ZDNet blog. Some R/WW readers may be interested in checking out those posts too, so here are the recent ones:
- Morfik tests browser boundaries - builds Javascript chess app
- WebOS market review
- XIN - a Web OS that wants to be a platform
- Is Google or Microsoft best positioned for Web Office?
- Google Calendar - further progress on Google’s Web Office suite
- Review of Zimbra - a feature-laden Web Office Suite contender
- Embracing and Extending Microsoft: JotSpot’s Joe Kraus on the Web Office
I'm just getting started too, there's more to come! Say Robert, hopefully Ray Ozzie checks these out :-)
News Corp has quietly released its own set of blogs, dubbed "Newsblog". The design is rather bland and the actual personalities of the bloggers is not revealed. It all seems a bit too corporate for my tastes, but some of the 'blogs' are getting a large amount of traffic already. For example a post about an Australian military death published yesterday has 584 (and counting) comments! There's also a Big Brother blog, which at least has some pictures in it to liven up the design.
In related news, News Corp executive James MacManus (no relation) has accused the BBC of "blatantly commercial ambitions" and of seeking "to create a digital empire". In other words: Hey, we're the digital empire around here - rack off!
James Governor of analyst firm Redmonk has posted a thoughtful piece on how blogging is changing the analyst and PR landscapes. When he wrote this part, he may as well have been talking about myself and Read/WriteWeb:
"Bloggers and emerging non-traditional analyst firms are increasingly influencing technology and product strategies. In order to make money, many of the new blog influencers will try and make their way as paid trusted advisors. Some will do implementation work as well. They are the new influencers."
The way I make my living these days is as an independent Web Analyst. I do market research and analysis reports for various Internet companies across Silicon Valley, the UK and recently Australia (but I have no clients in New Zealand, my home country!). All of this work came via my blog Read/WriteWeb and the reputation I've built up over time with it. And in fact, Read/WriteWeb now mirrors my paid work - even if the blog doesn't pay my bills directly. What I mean is: R/WW is about product positioning, analysis, industry insights. Which is what I do in my consulting gigs. So when Dave Winer writes about how your blog is your advertisement to the world, I know exactly what he means.
The other point James makes is that some bloggers, such as myself, are becoming paid advisors to startups and companies. I've just recently begun to look into becoming a member of a few advisory boards. I'll of course declare those interests once they are confirmed, but I wanted to make it known that a) I am available for such advisory roles; and b) this is a natural consequence of becoming a specialist in a certain niche - which is what 'professional' blogging is all about. Incidentally, Stowe Boyd calls this Advisory Capital and his take on it is well worth reading.
Pic: Randy Glasbergen, from Ashwin
Bhatnagar
Currently I get a ton of email from startups and other companies asking for my advice or opinion. If their product interests me, I'll usually reply with some thoughts from the top of my head. I may even blog about their product (but I should emphasize that I only do so if it connects with general themes that I'm tracking).
Of course if I am invited to be a paid adviser to a startup, then I'll spend a lot more time thinking about their product and sending them specific advice. So in that sense, the old adage 'you get what you pay for' is still true in the new media world :-)
This also leads me
to clarify what Read/WriteWeb is about these days. I consider it my main blog and the one
that best defines my interests, although I've been writing up a storm of great content on
my ZDNet blog recently (if I do say so
myself). My focus on ZDNet has been Web Office and similar 'techie' (often
enterprise-focused) things - that's my voice on ZDNet and to be frank it took me
good few months to find that voice. On Read/WriteWeb I tend to write more about consumer 'web
2.0' and new media - focusing on product positioning, analysis, industry insights. Which
as I mentioned, mirrors the consulting and advisory work I do for a living.
Although I 'give away' a lot of analysis and insights for free on Read/WriteWeb, in the long run it enhances my reputation - which leads to paid work, both consulting and advisory. It works both ways too, because I get a lot of insights from other people for free - via email and other bloggers.
p.s. feel free to email me if you'd like me on your advisory board ;-)
The BBC has always been at the vanguard of new media in the Web 2.0 era, thanks in part to their public service charter - but also they obviously have a lot of smart, innovative thinkers on board. Today they announced "bbc.co.uk 2.0", which will be a full-on attempt to turn BBC online into a Web 2.0 poster boy. They're even going to create a "public service version of MySpace.com", according the The Guardian report.
The project has been named 'Beyond Broadcast' and it outlines "a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts - "share", "find" and "play"." According to Ashley Highfield, the BBC director of new media and technology, "share" is the key concept.
The most interesting angle for me though is the "play" part, which is really where BBC's strength lies. The sharing and finding are not their core services, despite their desire (and no doubt ability) to compete with the likes of MySpace and Yahoo. Given BBC's huge stock of professional media content and their existing multimedia technologies, the "play" is I suspect what bbc.co.uk 2.0 will look to as its linchpin:
"At the heart of the play concept is MyBBCPlayer, which will allow the public to download and view BBC programming online and was today rebranded as BBC iPlayer."BBC iPlayer is going to offer catch-up television up to seven days after transmission," said Mr Highfield. "At any time you will be able to download any programme from the eight BBC channels and watch it on your PC and, we hope, move it across to your TV set or down to your mobile phone to watch it when you want."
In any case, once again kudos to the BBC for leading the charge into 21st century web-based media. I hope my own New Zealand government proceeds down a similar path, with its NZ Online initiative (of which I'm a part of, as a ThinkTank member).
Recently I wrote a series
of posts about Microcontent Design,
using BBC Backstage as the main case study. As a segue
from that theme, one of the product types I've been looking at recently is
Microcontent Aggregators. One type of Microcontent Aggregator is a service that
aggregates microcontent about a person (usually via RSS) and displays it on a new page/site
for users to view in aggregate. Usually such services also have external RSS feeds, so
that users may subscribe to an aggregate feed for a person. It's probably easiest if I
explain using an example... these are a bunch of feeds associated with me currently:
- Read/WriteWeb
- My ZDNet blog
- My Flickr account
- My del.icio.us account
- My 43Things account
- My Allconsuming account
The list could go on, but the point is I (like many others) publish my content in more than a few places. A Microcontent Aggregator brings all that content together in one interface - and feed.
I looked at a number of these people-focused mc aggregators and narrowed it down to 3 that were 'best of breed' - peoplefeeds, Suprglu, and 43Things. I'll profile these and others in a series of posts. My favourite currently is 43Things, because of its functionality and also unlike the other two it has an API.
43Things was built
by a Seattle startup called The Robot Coop, formed
by some ex-Amazon developers in late 2004. I had the pleasure of meeting them in person while I
was in Seattle in January. 43Things has a number of subsites, which to be honest makes it
somewhat difficult to navigate around. But the functionality and range of things you
can do is top notch. You can publish your goals (43things), track people (43people), enter reviews (allconsuming), list cities (43places), create list of bests (a recent
acquisition).
One of the great things about 43Things is that there are RSS feeds for everything. What's more, you can aggregate feeds on your People > Feeds page. For example my aggregator page is: http://ricmac.43people.com/feeds.
As you can see, I can view all my main feeds from the one page. Now to be honest, I don't use it very often - perhaps because I'm more of a 'professional' blogger than a social one. Which would explain why my Flickr account hasn't been updated for a while! But I can definitely see a use for this - and microcontent aggregators in general - for those people who use the Web for social networking and personal blogging. For example I know that a large number of younger people have both MySpace and Facebook accounts - not to mention Xanga, LiveJournal, etc. So a tool like 43Things is a good option to aggregate all those accounts together in one interface and feed (for those who want to subscribe to your activities).
Another plus for 43Things is the ability to filter the aggregate feed. People who have been reading R/WW for a while know that filtering is one of my hot buttons this
year. With 43Things you can add and personalize feeds by going to your subscriptions
page, e.g.:
http://ricmac.43people.com/subscriptions/add_feed
Robot Coop co-founder Erik Benson wrote a post earlier this year explaining the process:
"Now, some people (like me) probably are a little overzealous about adding content… so there’s a chance that you don’t actually want to see every blurry camera phone picture I post. For cases like this, you can unsubscribe from particular feeds within a person’s set of feeds and still be subscribed to the person as a whole. You do this by clicking on their name in the sidebar and selecting only the content that you want."
The filtering aspect is excellent and proof that 43Things is a forward-thinking app. The one thing that could be improved (imho) is the navigation, to make it easier to use and find your way around. But all in all, if you're looking for a fun and highly functional microcontent aggregator then give 43Things a go. I'll profile the other people-focused mc aggregators in posts to come.
- GData and
Open Standards (Matt Kaufman from edgeio thinks Google could've done better to
support existing open standards like Structured Blogging -- via Jeff Clavier)
- The Economist feature on new media (high level look at things like blogging and wikipedia)
- Diversified Media Companies - Year To Date Price Breakouts (a chart which shows most media stocks struggling - News Corp is one of the few above the line though...)
- YouTube: Too rough for advertisers? (interesting article that explores how advertisers are coming to grips with new media and, perhaps more importantly, what young people like these days)
- TVGuide.com Launches Blogging Community (I did some work for Susan Mernit on this, so great to see TVGuide launching into blogging in a big way - 65+ "entertainment blogs" and users can create their own too)
- Should Google Have Waited for ‘ThinkFree’? (I'll be reviewing Web Office contender ThinkFree soon, but in the meantime it's getting good press...)
- WebOS market review (Over at ZDNet I take a look at the still nascent WebOS space, which is one thing Google hasn't entered...yet)
- ProgrammableWeb 2.0 goes live (one of my fave tech resources, John Musser's mashups site gets a facelift -- looks great and I love the new stats features!)
Flickr pic by seanjordan: "During his CES keynote Google cofounder Larry Page argues a strong case for open standards."
So Russell Beattie has decided to call
it a day. I admit his decision surprised me, because I've always enjoyed
reading Russ' well-informed commentary on the mobile Web. However it did make me
wonder - what would cause other people to give up blogging?
Here are the top ten reasons I could think of:
10. Your Alexa ranking is so low that it actually drops below the horizontal axis.
9. You are the number 1 result in Google for "blogorrhoea".
8. You never get any links from A-listers, despite constantly linking to them. Well there was that one time when Mike Arrington linked to you in his diary blog Crunchnotes, but he used the 'nofollow' tag.
7. Your commentary on new products and services is so bad that even web 2.0 PR companies refuse to email you.
6. Valleywag doesn't merely ignore you, it laughs about you behind your back on supr.c.ilio.us.
5. You once got a mention on Steve Rubel's blog, but in a post entitled 'How NOT to blog' (and he refused to link to you).
4. You once tried to be a Snarky blogger, but all the other snarky bloggers then turned snarky on you and you ended up converting to a new religion to recover.
3. You've tried being controversial in order to gain attention, especially with a memorable post entitled 'Why Web 2.0 is like the Hindenburg Blimp', but nobody took the bait.
2. Your Technorati rank has 8 figures in it.
1. According to Gabe Rivera's algorithms, tumbleweeds have a better chance of making it onto Tech.Memeorandum than your blog.
Photo: wonderbread74
My ZDNet post today explores the reasons behind Google's new syndication format, GData. Like most people, Jeff Jarvis isn't sure what this means - and neither is Dave Winer. I'm in the same boat, but what I do know is that Google has taken a sudden interest in extending RSS and Atom. Check out this Google Base documentation, for RSS 2.0 and for all syndication formats. This is all about enabling bulk upload of items into Google Base, which you'll recall is Google's potential giant database of structured data on the Web. Google is obviously eyeing RSS (or syndication in general) as a means of getting people to upload data to Google Base. But why did Google feel the need to create a new protocol, called GData?
My initial reaction was that GData is a way to mix RSS/Atom with their APIs, in order to better integrate their increasing number of web applications. I'm not sure if this points to less of a walled garden, or paradoxically more of one because Google is defining the protocol now.
-
Yahoo buys digital home company Meedio (Meedio has a suite of products, including
Meedio TV, which "lets you watch, pause, rewind, and record live analog, digital, and
HDTV broadcasts using your existing PC...")
- Google-Vision: Is Google TV on its way? ("Google are advertising for an Interactive TV Product Manager in Mountain View, as well as Software Engineers with experience in 'emerging TV standards' and 'deploying robust, high-volume applications for consumer devices'")
- GData - Google's new syndication protocol (GData is a new protocol, but "based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0.")
- Live Drive: Microsoft's Gdrive Killer? (Microsoft readies its virtual hard drive service...)
- Microsoft's new brain (CNN profiles Microsoft's Web saviour, Ray Ozzie)
- Mobile Phones Could Soon Rival the PC As World’s Dominant Internet Platform ("France and the U.K are exhibiting the strongest growth in this trend, while Internet usage via mobile phone in Japan also continues to grow rapidly.")
- Google Enterprise Mashups to Suck in Data From Cognos, Oracle, and Salesforce.com ("The partnerships basically amount to Google and these enterprise software companies sharing APIs so that data from the various software systems can more easily be searched for through Google's OneBox corporate homepage." -- I like the phrase "consumerization of enterprise software"...)
- Podcasting Market Update (Feedburner stats reports are always insightful: "...while radio audience is declining, podcast circulation is consistently growing nearly 20% per month.")
- The new meaning of programming (Robert Young looks at what media programming means in the Internet age)
Photo: Michael Hainsworth
