This week Yahoo has released some new
initiatives and polished up the design of existing content properties. Here is R/WW's summary of the action, along with some commentary...
Yahoo TV has had a re-design, giving it a liberal sprinkling of Ajax and social Web features. I was interested to read Steve Rubel's take on this and other recent Yahoo re-designs, in which he claims that Yahoo is "backing away from RSS". He wrote:
"In the past few weeks Yahoo has rolled out three major new web sites - Yahoo! Food, Yahoo! Advertising and Yahoo! TV. They're great sites, but none of them has feeds. There's a reason why - eyeballs."
Of course, those three sites that Steve mentions are all very mainstream - and RSS is still not anywhere near mass uptake. But Steve is right that Yahoo has been a leader over the past couple of years in efforts to mainstream RSS, so it is a little disappointing they aren't continuing to push it in the likes of Y! TV.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced
today the business availability of the Windows Vista operating system, the 2007
release of Microsoft Office, and other new business software offerings. Vista and Office
07 be available from 30 January. The OS and Office launches were described as "the
beginning of the most significant product launch in company history". It was also noted
that it's the first "simultaneous release" of Windows and Office since the joint launch
of the Windows 95 operating system and Office 95 more than a decade ago.
There wasn't a lot for Web fans to sink their teeth into from Ballmer's speech today - judging by the press release and Mary-Jo Foley's report anyway. The closest Ballmer came to recognizing the huge importance of the Internet was the theme of "People-Ready Business", which was couched in the usual Microsoft talk of enhancing productivity, unleashing potential, etc.
However there is one Web-related paragraph in the press release:
Orange Spain, a mobile operator, has two new music services - 'New Talents' and 'Enjoy your Music'. Both are powered by Music Intelligence Solutions, a provider of AI (artificial intelligence) software for music recommendation and discovery.
Music Intelligence Solutions is an intriguing company. It was founded in 2002 and is based in Spain and the US West Coast. They describe themselves as "a diverse group of musicians and mathematicians". Their customers range from record labels, to radio stations, to musicians and artists, to MP3 Player Manufacturers, to Music Retailers, to mobile operators. So they cover the whole spectrum of the music industry, which is unusual in a service provider.
Blastfeed is the latest in RSS filter products to
cross my virtual desk. Back in April I looked at this
space and at the time noted that filtering would be a hot topic in 2006. Why? Because
it's the next step up from RSS aggregation, as many of us now have too much information
coming at us.
But we're now at the end of November and really, to be frank, there hasn't been much progress made in the RSS filtering space.
First a bit of background about why information filtering is so important. Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a post this week explaining how he monitors RSS feeds to get the latest news of interest to him. Like Marshall, I'm an Information Omnivore (I'll devour anything and everything!), but it's important for my business that I not get overwhelmed with information. As it is, I'm guilty of not replying to too many emails - let alone keeping up with the hundreds of RSS feeds I subscribe to. And OK, both Marshall and I are RSS-obsessed bloggers - but in reality nearly everyone is overloaded with information these days, RSS or not.
Searchfeed.com is one of a large group of so-called
"second tier" PPC (Pay-Per-Click) search advertising networks - others include Kanoodle, InfoSeek, and
Looksmart. SearchEngineWatch lists some more on this page (nb: it's
3 years old, but I couldn't find a more up-to-date list). The first tier services are
Google AdWords and Overture - in which Google is a clear leader.
Searchfeed has just announced its latest Network search figures, which claim an increase in total searches from 2 billion per month in December 2005 to 6 billion searches per month in November 2006. The company noted (in an email I received) that this is in line with general online advertising trends:
"This increase mirrors overall 2006 industry growth as U.S. Internet advertising revenues reached a record $4.2 billion in the third quarter of 2006, representing a 35% increase over the $3.1 billion figure posted for the third quarter of 2005."
The growth path of Searchfeed - and other second tier search advertising networks - is to provide web publishers with co-branded search solutions. In other words, second tier search engines have to somehow convince web publishers NOT to use Google Adsense or Overture - or at least pick them to run ads alongside Google or Overture. At the same time second tier networks must entice advertisers on board with their Pay-Per-Click solutions (also known as CPC - Cost-Per-Click).
Just a quick admin note about a few things. Firstly, Read/WriteWeb has been
growing so well in recent months that I'm in the process of expanding the site. Key to
this is continuing to provide premium content on web technology - and building a
community around that. So I want to thank all the regular and loyal readers of R/WW -
especially for all the comments you make, which puts the 'write' in Read/Write ;-)
In related news.... in order to focus more on R/WW, I've reluctantly given up my ZDNet blog. I enjoyed my time writing there and especially the series of posts I did on Web Office, which got me thinking about that space a lot! Of course, all the topics I used to cover on ZDNet will now be found on R/WW.
There are a couple of sponsor slots opening up shortly in the sidebar, which sell for a very reasonable CPM. On Read/WriteWeb, you are guaranteed to reach a large number of smart, influential decision makers and early adopters. So if reaching that audience (and supporting premium content about Web Technology) is your goal for your new web 2.0 product or service, send me an email to request more details about R/WW sponsorship.
A Jobs Board is going live very soon on Read/WriteWeb and more exciting developments are in the works. Read/WriteWeb is now pretty much my full-time business (I've also cut back on consulting engagements), so you'll start to see this site bloom over the next few months :-)
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus.
We have written before about the innovative Amazon Web Services Platform. This stack was officially announced by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during the recent Web 2.0 summit and is now considered part of the core business strategy for Amazon. While analysts, competitors and Wall Street are pondering what to make of this move from a business sense, in this post we look at who is utilizing Amazon Web Services - and how. This post is based on personal communication with those people, along with the set of success stories available on the Amazon Web Services site.
The fact is many small, medium and even large businesses (even Microsoft), rushed to put Amazon Web Services to use. Why did they do it? Because Amazon offers a decade of experience in running one of the largest internet enterprises - and has wrapped this expertise into a set of pre-packaged services and APIs.
To remind you, here again is the Amazon Web Services Stack:
Increasingly marketing firms are using
popular social networks on the Web as part of their campaigns - creating fake user profiles to sell their products. On one hand this is not a
good thing for social networks, because the last thing they want is to be clogged up with
marketing campaigns masquerading as users in their systems. But the reality is that
marketing campaigns are becoming a popular aspect of social networks now - and in virtual
worlds such as Sims - and so they help drive page views and therefore advertising for
those social networks.
One interesting marketing campaign crossed my desk recently, which has stats to show how successful it was (see below). Niccolò Magnani from the Italian office of MRM Worldwide told me about a campaign he ran for an Italian beverage company called Campari. Now I should at this point warn you that the following material is not necessarily work safe!
The theme of the Hotel Campari website is of a raunchy hotel. Purely for research purposes of course, I browsed around the site. It is a Flash-driven website with sensual music and a lot of interactivity (mainly involving the opening of doors). The campaign and website features the lovely Salma Hayek too.
It's going to be a busy
month or two for Microsoft, as the business launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007 is set for November 30 and there are a
number of complementary initiatives that will see the light of day soon. One is the Expression suite
of web design tools. Expression
Web is part of the suite and is a standards based Web Design tool, which will replace
Microsoft's staple WYSIWYG webpage editor Frontpage.
Expression Web is for building web pages, but there is another tool in the Expression product suite called Expression Interactive Designer; which is the designer environment for things like WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation, from which the New York Times Reader was developed) and WPF/E (a cross browser solution).
As part of the upcoming launch, I spoke to Leon Brown (responsible for the Expression Tools Suite business throughout the Asia Pacific Region) and Ray Stephenson (a Regional Manager) from Microsoft. Both are on their way to New Zealand next week to promote Expression and other things - interested kiwis should check out this page for the schedule.
Ultrastar is a music fan site management company,
started by David Bowie in the late 90's. They create and manage sites for a range of pop
music acts - such as The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Rolling
Stones, David Bowie, Sting, INXS and about 9
other acts. They emailed me today to tell me about out a new product for all their
bands, a media player called the Virtual Ticket. Basically it's a rich
media player that enables members of the fan sites to spread video clips to non-members.
It's also kind of like a lite social network system, in that it features chat and
commenting throughout.
Virtual Ticket is being marketed as an "on-line tour companion" for bands/artists, because it gives extra media content and regular updates (e.g. band member video diaries or behind the scenes action) to people who buy their concert tickets. The aim is to create more of a relationship between the artist and their fans.
A good example of Virtual Ticket in action is at The Who's latest tour website, where it has been labeled Squeezebox. It features videos of The Who playing, behind the scenes videos, setlists for each show, photosets, documentary videos, news stories, interviews... and much more. There is also a chatroom and the whole site is basically a social network system for Who fans. While all of this kind of content has been available before on music band websites, the system behind it (Virtual Ticket) is a turnkey solution for bands to provide all these features to fans.
