ReadWriteWeb

After my post that reviewed promising new email subscription services Zookoda and Yutter, I got an email from Feedburner telling me they had a new email service in the works. Tonight it was released - in fact you may have noticed it in my site menu earlier today. True to form, Feedburner's new offering is slick and took only a few minutes to set up in my Feedburner account and on my website.

The main features:

• The emails are not branded, so they look as if they come from the publisher (and the reply-to email address is that of the publisher).
• The publisher has full access to their email list, within their Feedburner account, and can export it anytime.
• The email subscription form is cut-and-past javascript, which is easy for the publisher to implement.
• The emails are delivered daily.
• The HTML rendering of the blog content is very good, on a par with (even better in some cases) a normal RSS Reader.
• It's a free service.
• No subscriber interface in which the subscriber can manage things at FeedBurner.
• No subscriber landing page on signup.

Those last two points signify that this is a publisher-centric offering from Feedburner and they're not attempting to be an email aggregator. This is in line with what Zookoda and Yutter are doing. 

Feedburner has existing partnerships with Squeet and Feedblitz (note: Phil Hollows from Feedblitz made some good comments in my previous post, in response to my criticism of them). But it's always made sense for Feedburner to integrate email into their service - and make it as publisher-friendly as possible.

Sample of email

Feedburner's large user base and the fact that so many influential bloggers use their service already is going to make it tough for Zookoda and Yutter to make headway. Many bloggers, like I did today, will find it easier to just 'switch on' the Feedburner option rather than start a new account with an unknown service. Mike Arrington certainly thinks so.

However I'm planning to give both Zoodoka and Yutter a fair chance for my business, because I was impressed enough with their feature sets to want to trial them further. And I will, once I get some time to implement them on R/WW.

Of course now that Feedburner has entered the market with its own product, it'll be interesting to see how Zoodoka, Yutter and the others differentiate themselves. Zoodoka seems to have more advanced features than Feedburner, like creating custom email newsletters. And Yutter has some nice options too, such as blog branding, which Feedburner lacks. So despite the odds being stacked in RSS heavyweight Feedburner's favor, I'm not declaring Game Over just yet.

p.s. if you like this post, why not subscribe to Read/WriteWeb either by RSS - or email using this form:

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I love web apps that are very easy to install and use - and have an ongoing benefit. Priceheat falls into this category, because it literally took me 10 seconds to install and I can see myself using it a lot. To install all I needed to do was drag a link from their website onto my Firefox toolbar. Priceheat is described as a "a one-click Amazon price checker, a bookmarklet, a widget, price comparison 2.0." Despite the inevitable "2.0" moniker, what it actually does is provide a one-click way to find the cheapest price for an item. For example, it looks like I'll be buying the new Pearl Jam album from Amazon (I don't know what J & R is):

I asked Veronika from Priceheat what their business model is and that too is refreshingly direct:

1 - Make fast, simple, easy to learn tools.
2 - Get them out to users as beta, get real feedback, and tweak.
3 - Sell the product when mature to a partner with marketing muscle.

This is what I hope personalized computer agents will be like in the future - simple to install and run, plus very useful!

This post was written by Ryan Stewart, who is a R/WW guest blogger on Rich Internet Apps. Edited by Richard MacManus.

In the coming months we will see a new wave of Rich Internet Applications that will blend the web application and the desktop application in exciting new ways. There are three technologies on the horizon that will change the way people use the web: LaszloSystems' OpenLaszlo, Microsoft's WinFX (codename Avalon) and Adobe's Flex 2.

OpenLaszlo

OpenLaszlo is a very intriguing technology. Originally it was built leveraging the Flash Platform, but has since announced that applications built in OpenLaszlo will be able to compile into DHTML/AJAX as well as Flash. In fact the first option will be to use the DHTML version. The language is XML based with some JavaScript abilities, which makes building the applications very easy. The versatility of being able to leverage Flash or DHTML is also a major plus. It is entirely open source and the use of XML and JavaScript makes it a good way to get started building Rich Internet Applications quickly. 

If you're interested in seeing OpenLaszlo in action, they have a good demo app - LaszloMail.

Also check out Pandora, a 'web 2.0' application for finding music, which uses OpenLaszlo. The CTO Tom Conrad gave it great wraps in a blog post last August:

"Eight months ago when we sat down to figure out how were were going to deliver a compelling zero-install discovery and listening experience across Windows, Mac, and Linux in record time we considered everything you can imagine: plain old HTML, AJAX, Flex, OpenLaszlo to name just a few. In the end, Laszlo was the clear winner on all fronts. Mature, reliable, and the perfect tool for the job."

WinFX

WinFX, specifically the Windows Presentation Foundation formerly code-named Avalon, is the biggest question mark of the three. It is Microsoft's answer to the Rich Internet Application space, and it's interesting because in many ways it's the Bigfoot of RIAs. It uses the .NET platform and via an XML markup language (XAML) it provides developers with an easy way to build powerful user interfaces for all kinds of applications, both web and desktop. 

As with other Microsoft technologies it will be limited to Windows machines. However it opens up the Direct3D platform to developers - which is going to make for some amazing user interfaces. The .NET community is huge, and WinFX is going to be the backbone of Windows Vista, meaning that it will be an easy way to deploy applications for a brand new operating system. Real world examples are scarce because Avalon hasn't been released yet, but you can see it in action by downloading Microsoft MAX. There is also an interesting white paper on the MSDN site about using Avalon to create a North Face In-Store Explorer. You can also get the beta and see what WinFX has to offer.

Flex

The final technology, and the one I (Ryan) am admittedly most excited about, is Adobe's Flex 2. It too uses an XML based language (MXML) and as to be expected leverages the Flash Platform. Adobe/Macromedia's first foray with Flex required a very expensive server and had limited adoption. This time, Adobe has opened the floodgates and made the Flex 2 framework totally free. The new version of Flex will require a new Flash Player, and Adobe has rewritten the Flash virtual machine with a focus on speed and dependability. They're releasing the new player for Linux and Mac in addition to the normal Windows version, so the potential audience is huge. 

Adobe has built a Flex-AJAX bridge, which brings the best of AJAX and the best of Flash together to create some awesome potential. Adobe also has 'Apollo' in the works, which will allow developers to access desktop APIs using Flex or JavaScript to deploy desktop/web hybrid applications for times when data needs to be stored offline. Flash is grown up from the days of 'skip intro' and has the potential to provide a great user experience. 

Yahoo Maps - which recently got TechCrunch's vote as the best mapping framework on the Web - uses Flex 1.5. Also check out the Flex 2 Style Explorer, which provides a way to see the power and customization of Flex (requires the Flash 8.5 beta 2 player).

Summary

All of these applications are taking the tenants of Web 2.0 - the collaborative spirit, the user generated content - and combining them with a focus on the user experience, which is so important to the desktop. AJAX has done a stellar job of making people think about the web in new ways. The technologies above are going to take that to the next level, by providing a desktop-like interface to web users. 

Rich Internet Apps allow sophisticated effects and transitions that are important in keeping the user engaged. This means developers will be able to take the amazing changes in the Web for granted and start focusing on a flawless experience for the users. It is going to be an exciting time for anyone involved in building the new Web, because the interfaces are finally catching up with the content.

Ryan Stewart's blog is Digital Backcountry.

In Part 1 of this series I introduced the concept of Microcontent Design, followed by a case study of BBC's developer network backstage.bbc.co.uk in Part 2. Now let's look at what's being built by external parties, using the BBC Backstage ecosystem. Specifically this post is an in-depth and developer-focused look into a application called Mightyv, a TV listings app. My aim is to discover what makes a third party mashup of BBC content, like Mightyv, possible. Both from a BBC design and external developer points-of-view, but perhaps most importantly how this type of mashup application benefits users.

BBC TV Listings competition

Backstage held a TV Listings competition in July 2005. The idea was for contestants to rethink how to present BBC TV and Radio listings, using the TV-Anytime data format for 7 day listing data and other relevant RSS feeds. As described on the Backstage blog:

"The way people watch television - and choose what they are going to watch - is changing. More channels, new delivery platforms, new ways to consume television programming...

For the first backstage.bbc.co.uk competition, we are offering you the opportunity to innovate and build prototypes that demonstrate new ways of exploring the BBC TV schedule."

In October 2005 the winners were announced. An application called mightyv, developed by Leon Brocard and Leo Lapworth, was the ultimate winner. Mightyv is a personalized tv scheduling service, which also enables users to track their friends schedules. It features extensive search, which can be subscribed to with RSS feeds. It also has many options for viewing tv and radio listings, customizing channel lists, tags, ratings, recommendations. The BBC calls this "findability".

Mightyv isn't restricted to BBC data - it also uses data from an independent website called bleb.org, for non-BBC channel data. The developers note that the bleb.org data isn't "as rich in meta data (genre/group/series) as the BBC so you will see a marked difference in the search results because of this." So obviously the more meta data you can provide in your RSS feeds and APIs, the better it is for developers and users!

Mightyv: step by step

What makes much of mightyv possible is the metadata rich '7 Day Listing Data' RSS feed. It's a daily snapshot of BBC TV and radio 7-day listing information and is in the TV-Anytime data format (specifications developed by the TV-Anytime Forum, an industry body).  

As it states on the main page, the data is originally sourced from the BBC's scheduling system but undergoes some manipulations in order to provide TV-Anytime features. The BBC eventually provides it to developers in XML format.

The following naming structure is used for the XML files: YYYYMMDDCCCC_TT.xml, where:

YYYY	- Year
MM	- Month
DD	- Day
CCCC	- Channel (variable length)
TT	- Table Type

Let's look at the main XML files, as they relate to Mightyv.

ProgramInformationTable

The program I'm going to use for my example is a BBC World Service radio program called 'Go Digital'. It sounds like something readers of Read/WriteWeb would be interested in! For this example, I'm going to use the episode of Go Digital that was broadcast on 21 February 2006 at 20:05.

We find out more about Go Digital in an XML file labeled 20060221BBCWrld_pi. The 'pi' stands for 'ProgramInformationTable' and it contains the metadata of the program - title, synopsis, whether it's subtitled, etc:

The key piece of data that we're interested in for now is the unique program ID on line 1: 'crid://bbc.co.uk/1736500958' (note: the BBC design policy is to give each piece of content a unique identifier). Here's how it's described in the BBC help documentation:

"Each programme is allocated a CRID (Content Reference IDentifier), that represents unique programme content (repeated material would generally have the same CRID). All the tables are linked together using the CRIDs. At the moment the CRIDs are not guaranteed to be unique for all time."

Returning to the ProgramInformationTable. The program title and synopsis are listed on lines 3-4. Genre data is listed on lines 5-22, followed by other metadata including the webpage for the 'Go Digital' program - listed on line 28 under the 'MediaURI' tag as http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/1478157.stm. That webpage has links to the radio show in MP3 format and other relevant information. Screenshot:

ProgramLocationTable

But we're still looking for one vital piece of data - the time and date of the program. Nowhere in the 'ProgramInformationTable' XML file is that data to be found. It is in fact in another XML file, named 20060221BBCWrld_pl, which is the ProgramLocationTable. This file describes where and when the content can be found, which of course is the data that drives tv listings.

Line 40 references the unique program id: 'crid://bbc.co.uk/1736500958'. Then on line 43 is the information we're after:

<PublishedStartTime>2006-02-21T20:05:00Z</PublishedStartTime>

Deciphered, the above piece of code means: the Go Digital program will screen on 21 February 2006 at 22:05.

ContentReferencingTable

The ContentReferencingTable is a little more complicated. It provides the precise location(s) where an item of content can be found, which in general means it lists instances of a program. It can also be used to group programs, for example into series or collections.

In our Go Digital example above, here is an extract from the ContentReferencingTable, 20060221BBCWrld_cr:

Line 50 has details of the episode broadcast on 21 February 2006 at 22:05:

GroupInformationTable

The final table in our example contains descriptions of groups. Like programs, groups are also identified by a CRID (Content Reference IDentifier). Indeed the structure and content of the GroupInformationTable is very similar to the ProgramInformationTable, in that it provides the metadata for the groups. Here's an example from a file called groups_gr:

This extract describes a group containing the Go Digital radio program.

There are other XML files provided by the BBC, but our purpose here is just to gain an understanding of the main content components of the Mightyv mashup.

Mightyv display

The end result for the user is that 'Go Digital' displays on the mightyv tv listings webpage, scheduled for 22:05 on 21 February 2006. Below is a screenshot, showing also the Go Digital Synopsis metadata (from ProgramInformationTable) in a pop-up:

(nb: the numbers down the side represent hours, not date)

Caveats and Issues

It's important to note that the Mightyv application is in one sense only as good as the data it gets, which is mainly from the BBC. Backstage is careful to note some caveats and issues with the TV-Anytime data they provide. For example they state:

"This data is generated for experimental purposes only. There are some known issues with repeated programmes occasionally not being allocated the same CRIDs - these issues are being looked at and improved. Accuracy is striven for, but not currently guaranteed! Any feedback on any aspects of this data would be most appreciated."

Once again this is an illustration of who holds the balance of power in a mashup - it's the data owner.

Mightyv functionality

So the TV-Anytime data from the BBC allows Mightyv to provide a fairly straight-forward tv listings service, without having to do too much tinkering under the hood. Of course, the main value in a mashup is in developing something unique and compelling on top of the basic data. So let's take a look and see why the BBC chose Mightyv as the winner of its backstage developer competition.

If the user clicks on the blue underlined 'Go Digital' link on the tv listings page, they are sent to another mightyv page which has further options (if logged in):

Options include rating the program, tagging it, adding it to your schedule. So there are some neat 'web 2.0' features there. Admittedly it has a ways to go to be truly compelling to users, but you can see the potential in Mightyv. Especially when you consider that personalizing your TV-watching schedule is becoming increasingly important, as television integrates with the Web.

Tonight Google unveiled its online Calendar. As usual whenever Google releases a product these days, it prompted me to ponder the Google Office :-) I'm convinced it's around the corner, so I decided to check Google's progress on this 'Moby Dick' - the Great Web Office! More on my ZDNet blog, but here's the table I came up with:

Web Office Element	Does Google have it?	Status
Email	Yes - Gmail	The best and most innovative web email system around. Gmail recently turned 2 years old, so it's a mature and dependable product (despite still having the 'beta' label!).
Calendar	Yes - Google Calendar	Brand new, but looking good and playing nicely with Gmail already.
Web processing	Yes - Writely and whatever else Google has been cooking up behind closed doors	Early stages - Writely was the best of breed among web-based word processors in my recent review, but it's still very early in the innings for word processing on the Web.
Spreadsheet	Not that we know of	There are some great solutions on the open market currently: JotSpot Tracker, NumSum, iRows. Perhaps a Writely-like acquisition is on the cards from Google in this space, unless Google is working on their own app.
Presentations (i.e. Powerpoint competitor)	Not that we know of	I didn't uncover many web-based presentation apps in my Best of Breed post, but I was informed afterwards that a few folks are working on it.
Database (i.e. Access equivalent)	Maybe - Google Base?	Google Base is Google's growing database of structured data, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that they'll use it for this purpose in a Web Office suite.
Web design	Google Page Creator	Well, it's a start…
Project Management	Not that we know of	Your guess is as good as mine.
RSS	Google Reader	A solid product that will likely be integrated into Gmail at some point - as Yahoo has done with RSS and Microsoft will in Vista.
Desktop management	Google Desktop	OK not technically an 'office' application, but Google Desktop - which integrates search on the Web with desktop - will be a key part of any Google Web Office system.

[Read more at ZDNet...]

A couple of months ago Mike Arrington posted a plea to the blogosphere for more email syndication services for blogs. Mike didn't like the overly orange branding of Feedblitz, but more to the point he noted that blogs still need email. Now I'm about as big an RSS advocate as you'll find on the Web, yet even I recognize that a lot of people don't use RSS - and until Microsoft embeds it into Outlook are unlikely to. I'm sure there are a number of people who would like to subscribe to my blog, but haven't done so because they're not interested in or intimidated by three letter acronyms and "news readers". Well email syndication is for those people - perhaps also for folks who don't like the information overload that RSS brings (it's still an issue in '06, despite the growing number of filter options).

Overview of the email syndication space

I agree with Mike that FeedBlitz is an eyesore. But it seems to be leading the pack currently in the 'blog email notification' space:

Other such services I've found include:

• blo.gs
• bloglet
• squeet
• MailFeed
• R | Mail
• RSSFWD
• Feedlinx

I'm sure there are others, but my intention with this post isn't to do a Frank Gruber and compare a bunch of services. I'm really after the 'next generation' email notification service - and two apps have come across my virtual desk recently which look promising in that respect.

Zookoda - compelling feature set

Zookoda is an Australian company that offers a range of email notification services, primarily email newsletters and "recurring broadcasts". The Zookoda team describes it as "web-based email marketing application designed specifically for bloggers". The best thing about this service is its powerful set of functionality, together with its flexibility. For example: a lot of non-RSS readers may not want to receive notification of every single post from your blog, but a weekly email newsletter with all the highlights may be just what those users need. Zookoda enables that and it also has reporting, which is a key feature for a 'next gen' email notification service to offer and especially relevant to marketers.

I spoke to Zookoda co-founder Nick McNaughton and he told me their user uptake is going very well (he provided me with the figures to back that up, but asked me not to publish them). They have a lot of great development plans too, which again I can't divulge. But what he did say for public consumption is that Zookoda is aimed at "publishers who are blogging to a non-technical audience" - that's where he thinks the target market is. I also think it's useful for a blog like mine, which is technical but probably has a lot of readers who mainly want to keep track of media trends - or of me personally (e.g. family and friends) - and so are not necessarily RSS junkies. An email newsletter may help me attract more of those readers.

To get started with Zookoda, check out this tutorial. It's a fairly lengthy process to get an email newsletter up and running. I'm still working on it, so I haven't yet published mine. The Zookoda blog has case studies. 

Yutter - simple yet hits the spot

Another interesting new email notification service is yutter (weird names must be a prerequisite for these services!). Yutter is currently in beta and they're still working on advanced features like analytics and OPML support for importing/exporting.

What I like about Yutter, even at this very early stage, is that it's very simple to use and the interface is a joy to behold (unlike the much-maligned FeedBlitz). Also it's good to know that Yutter emails will be counted in my Feedburner stats.

Summary

Although it's early days for both Zookoda and Yutter, they look to be very promising email notification services for blogs. Zookoda has a compelling feature set and one which I anticipate a lot of uses for, but their challenge will be to create a simple interface for it all. Yutter is a simpler feature set, but so far I'm encouraged by the neat interface and RSS/Feedburner compatibility.

Watch this space! I'll update my progress on both of these services - and please feel free to comment on your experiences or if you know of other promising email syndication services.

John Hagel has a thought-provoking post about microchunking and media businesses. It follows on from Umair Haque's post, in which Umair said that "unbundling" media (e.g. Disney releasing tv shows for free online) is only half the equation. The other half - the real value - is in "rebundling". By which he means individual users doing their own aggregation and filtering of media. Oftentimes Umair is hard to grok, but I think he nails it with this precise statement: "rebundling will be the future of connected consumption". If you consider what's happening with tv for example, you're starting to see the more adventurous vendors (like Tivo and BBC) give users the tools to personalize and organize their tv-watching experience.

Back to John Hagel's post, which nicely extends Umair's points. John notes:

"The most powerful brands in the media business will be held by successful intermediaries that help to consistently improve return on attention for audiences. In the process, the nature of the brand promise will change in a profound way.  It will be a massive opportunity for media companies that understand the shift in economic and competitive dynamics and that focus on the rebundling plays required to build these brands."

What this says to me is that there are opportunities here for "intermediaries" to aggregate and filter all the media (pro and amateur) coming at us nowadays, a lot of it directly via the Web. Some of those intermediaries will provide users with the tools to aggregate and filter - e.g. Tivo, Rojo, Google, Last.fm. Other intermediaries will directly do filtering themselves, for easier 'consumption' (yes I dislike that word) by users - e.g. what PaidContent does for its users and indeed what NY Times does for its readers. Of course there'll be a lot of intermediaries who mix n' match - e.g. Yahoo provides both aggregation/filtering tools for its users, but also has a strong human editorial process (take a look at the podcasts homepage for one example).

John goes on to make a distinction between product businesses and audience relationship businesses:

"Here‚Äôs the test:  how open is the media company to providing access to third party content on behalf of their audiences?  If the answer is not very open, the company is primarily a product business.  If the answer is very open, then the company is primarily an audience relationship business."

He's suggesting here that being in the audience relationship business is the way to go for media companies - i.e. don't try and control the content. Google has in fact already proved how successful this strategy is, because the raison d'etre of the Google homepage is to send users away to external content.

I'm exploring more on all these themes in my Microcontent Design series. Incidentally, I sometimes wonder where to place myself when I'm writing media posts. John Hagel comes from a management/strategy background, Umair is the Economics whizz, my pals at Rights Marketing are marketing folks, Fred Wilson is VC, Jeff Jarvis and Scott Karp are real media. As for me, I've discovered my focus is on the products - specifically the web technology. It's what I do as my day job too - analysis/research/product dev. So that's my beat. Anywho, this last paragraph is more for my benefit than yours :-) Everyone likes to have their place in the world.

Photo: carpeicthus

- Live.com to be homepage of Vista, IE7 (Niall Kennedy answers a question I asked at Microsoft Search Champs in January - HUGE news for RSS, search and gadgets)

- Microserfs, Revisted ("perhaps Scoble is the modern equivalent" - of the Microserfs narrator, I think he means...)

- Outlook on software in 2006: Healthy, disruptive (Dion Hinchcliffe summarizes the Software 2006 Industry Report - which is bullish on web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise)

- SEO Spending vs. Google Base (Jeremy suggests a service for inputting content into Google Base, as an SEO tool... I know of at least one vendor with plans to do this)

- The next killer apps on the "connected web" (nice case studies...)

- What's Missing: A Web 2.0 Critique (Stowe Boyd asks for "new and innovative ideas, not just a slightly different riff on meme tracking, or yet another email app, or just a different interface for photo sharing.")

- Subscription Music Services Compared (Frank Gruber is doing great work at TechCrunch... btw I've been seeing interesting tv ads from Nokia about their mobile music service - can't wait to see that.)

- Fred Wilson on Disney releasing tv shows on the Web ("We can't get to Umair's world of microchunked, rebundled media without the critical first step of freeing the content and focusing on monetizing it with new advertising models.")

- PaidContent on new media Emmy Award ("will recognize entertainment programs created specifically online, portable players and mobile content." -- Live 8 on AOL got the most buzz, but the others I don't know much about)

Flickr pic by Niall Kennedy: Bill Gates in a 1985 Windows advertisement.

The Structured Blogging website has been upgraded and went live tonight. I re-designed the website and did the writing for it, under the employ of Marc Canter's Broadband Mechanics and with the help of others in the Structured Blogging community such as Conor O'Neill. PubSub supplied the stylesheets and php code. Indeed PubSub and BBM are the driving forces behind Structured Blogging, but it really is an open source project at its heart. 

For those of you not familiar with Structured Blogging, it's an initiative that gives bloggers the tools to create and syndicate structured information - such as reviews and events. Kind of like what edgeio is doing commercially. Indeed I've always seen edgeio and SB as being highly complementary. I anticipate that a whole raft of other aggregators will emerge over the next few years, to collect structured data over the Web. Imagine an edgeio for reviews, or an open events aggregator. It's all about the edge, baby!

Structured Blogging is also about providing tools for using microformats, so you don't have to be a geek to use them ;-). SB.org currently offers two plugins for the popular blogging platforms Movable Type and Wordpress. In the future, we hope to see SB integrated into hosted platforms like Typepad and wordpress.com.

I'd recommend looking at the new Roadmap if you're at all interested in where Structured Blogging is going. Marc Canter largely created the roadmap, with input from the PubSub and BBM teams. Here's a snippet from it:

"In Part 2 of the Structured Blogging project, we want to enable people to DO things with microformats. Structured Blogging is all about providing end-users with solutions, enabling them to use microformats and microcontent. We're in the era of the 'Live Web' (or Web 2.0), which is about content applications and services that utilize the Web platform. But to make the Live Web work, we need compatible schemas and APIs to mesh all our apps and services together. There are a lot of missing links currently in the Live Web, which is where Structured Blogging can help."

Finally, if you're a blogger wondering: what's in it for me? Check out the new Benefits page. It's a great starting point.

- Social Media Spending to Hit $757M in 2010 (over half in the technology, auto and media categories...)

- Growing The Buzz (Alex Bosworth on Buzznet: "Plenty of room in the 300 billion advertising industry for social networks, they just need to be more aggressive about grabbing their share.")

- Dave Winer: The Internet as “idea processor” (Dave says never mind 'user generated content', the real value of writing on the Net "is that you can solve problems quickly" using a network of people)

- Eric Schmidt Unplugged (Google CEO speech -- covers all the usual 2.0 bases. But he also mentioned that Google is working on auto-translation products... which if it comes to fruition would allow me to finally cover the Asian 2.0 blogs!)

- Michael Parekh on Google's auto-translation ("Already almost 70% of the content on the web is in languages other than English, and growing fast.")

- Another China’s Web2.0 100 List (on the back of China’s Web2.0 Conference, apparently held in Beijing yesterday, comes a list of China's top 100 web 2.0 companies)

- Marc Canter asks a great question about Google Base ("...we still don’t know whether or not all this data is for Google’s exclusive use - or whether this structured data will be available publicly or not.")

- A CTO's guide to Web 2.0 (Adam Green gives us all a nice spiel to use on the CTO or CIO, next time he/she asks: "What's all this web 2.0 stuff about eh?") 

- While Big Companies Deliberate, Small Companies Obliterate (Fred Wilson tells us what to say when the CTO/CIO pooh-poohs what Adam told us to say!)

Flickr pic by Rick Bruner: Peter Hirschberg of Technorati shares his thoughts on Social Media at BlogOn 2005, with the great Marshall McLuhan pictured on the screen.