Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb and edited by Richard MacManus
Late last week AOL announced its
support of the open identity system OpenID, for all 63
million of their AOL/AIM Ids (for those looking for a quick introduction to OpenID, click
here). The details of the announcement, via the dev.aol.com blog, are as
follows:
This is an interesting gambit from AOL, which has generally been shifting from a subscription model (as it was in the 90's) to a rich media content/ad based business model. One of the ways they're doing this is by leveraging their access to the Time Warner content library. Opening up AOL/AIM user names via OpenID adds another dimension to this strategy. With OpenID integration, AOL hopes to find more uses for AOL/AIM usernames and therefore drive more sticky and consistent traffic to AOL.
New Zealand's biggest
newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, has run an article about me in Monday morning's paper.
It's on the back page of the Business section and is entitled
Kiwi blogger logs on to make a living. This is the first time I've had any mainstream
media coverage, so I admit it is quite a thrill. The article notes that Read/WriteWeb is
currently ranked the 51st biggest blog in the world, according to Technorati, and that around half our
readers are from the US (less than 1% are from my home country). There's also some advice
from me about how to earn a living from blogging. Nothing too profound: find a niche
topic that you're passionate about, then work hard and be very patient.
Thanks Simon Hendry and Alan Perrott from the Herald for the great story, and photographer Mark Mitchell (who took the above photo for the Herald). And regular readers may be wondering... I actually use a Windows machine for work, the beautiful Apple PC shown there is my wife's!
As for NZ Herald readers who have clicked through or typed in the readwriteweb.com URL via the newspaper, welcome! Our About page gives more information about this blog and its writers. If you're interested in Web technology, then feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed or subscribe to a daily email digest (see email subscription form in top right). We're currently working on a 'Best Of' section for R/WW, but in the meantime you may want to check out the Top 10 Read/WriteWeb Posts for 2006 and also these two popular posts: 2006 Web Technology Trends and 2007 Web Predictions. Those posts should give you a feel for the kind of writing we do here. Also feel free to email me for more information at: readwriteweb@gmail.com.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb.
It was a relatively quiet week in Web news. There were various mobile announcements from the 3GSM conference in Spain and some product releases (e.g. MS Soapbox). Also Google acquired video game advertising company Adscape. Perhaps the most interesting news came right at the end of the week, with Dell's web 2.0 Digg Clone and Video Sharing Site. But not much else to report really!
Our most popular post this week was an Index of the main video sharing sites. Emre Sokullu did a tremendous job of categorizing the white hot online video industry and listing the main players. The feedback to the post was overwhelming, but we plan to update it over time with more companies.
Also I recommend Alex Iskold's analysis of How Social Sites Reveal What Your Audience Likes. Especially if you're a blogger, there are some great tips in there on how to deliver what your audience wants. And as commenter James Brown noted, there's an opportunity for Google or even a startup to make these stats easier to obtain:
Saul Klein, the former
Skype global marketing VP who joined
VC firm Index Ventures this week, has a
great post on his blog about the European startup scene. I spoke to Saul earlier this
week and I will write up a post about that conversation next week. But for now, check out
Saul's post - it really nails why Web innovation is happening more and more outside
Silicon Valley.
Remember that our R/WW poll this week is on this very topic: does location matter in Web innovation? So far nearly half of you (47%) think that location does matter, but that several places in the world have just as high a chance of innovation as Silicon Valley (depending on product type and other factors). A third of you (34%) think that location doesn't matter and that innovation can happen equally everywhere (NZ, Timbuktoo, etc). Only 1/5 of you (20%) think that Silicon Valley has the highest chance of innovation.
As Saul pointed out in his post, there is much more to running a startup than simply having an idea and building a prototype. Silicon Valley definitely has a lot of advantages in terms of networking and the density of smart Web people in the area. But Europe is catching up:
This morning Dell unveiled a couple of
community-focused sites, essentially jumping into the web 2.0 waters with a splash.
They've released a
digg-like community site called IdeaStorm
and a video sharing site called
StudioDell. It's all part of Dell’s "Digital Media plan" and the new products
are designed to increase the interaction between Dell and its customers.
Dell IdeaStorm lets users submit their ideas about improving Dell's products and services, and the community votes on the best ideas. It's described on the Dell blog as "a combination between a message board and Digg.com." There will be some reactionary digg bait from other blogs about how IdeaStorm copies digg (yawn!), but really who cares about that. As our series on international web apps has shown, every country in the world has at least one digg clone. The real interest is in whether Dell can successfully build a community here. I'd say they have a great chance, given how many people in the world use Dell products - and how controversial Dell is (the exploding Dell laptop stories, its checkered customer service history, and so on). So if anything, I'm expecting some heated comments in IdeaStorm!
Written by Gang Lu and Richard MacManus
EditGrid, the main product of HongKong-based company
Team and Concepts (TnC) Ltd., is a leading Web 2.0 online spreadsheet service that
focuses on online collaboration and interoperability. Having had 1 year of development
and 9 months of public beta with 18 beta releases, yesterday EditGrid officially
announced its subscription service and removed the beta tag from its site. We spoke with
TnC's founder and Chairman, David Lee, a brilliant young man who was recently nominated
by BusinessWeek as one of Asia's
Best Entrepreneurs under 25. Also in this post we outline EditGrid's main features
and discuss why it's better than Google Spreadsheets.
The online spreadsheet market is crowded and the big players include Google Spreadsheets (as part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets), Zoho Sheet (as part of the Zoho Office Suite -- disclosure, Zoho is a R/WW sponsor), WikiCalc (a part of SocialText), ThinkFree Calc (as part of Thinkfree Office). But EditGrid is the only standalone online spreadsheet offering.
EditGrid boasts real-time-update (RTU), allowing users to see changes immediately when someone is editing the same spreadsheet, and extensive collaboration features. It has a feature called Remote data, which fetches data from the web (e.g. stock information and foreign exchange data) and puts it into a spreadsheet. Also EditGrid has many more functions available than Google Spreadsheet - EditGrid has over 500 functions (like SUM () etc), whereas Google Spreadsheet has 230+; at least according to this EditGrid comparison of EditGrid to Goog Spreadsheets and MS Excel 2003.
- Yahoo implements digg-style voting across some of its products; two opposing headlines pretty much sum this story up... Yahoo Anecdotal's headline: It takes two to Tango (suggesting interaction between Y! developers and their users); digg's headline: Yahoo Shamelessly Rips Off Digg and Brags About It. The first digg commenter on the story wittily notes: ""It takes two to tango" — one to lead, another to follow."
- From semantic Web (3.0) to the WebOS (4.0); Dan Farber has done a good job of summarizing Nova Spivack's wordy article about Web 3.0 and 4.0. As Dan remarked, "the concept of Web 3.0 is still a bit fuzzy, and Web 4.0, the WebOS on Nova's map, is really hazy." Still, it's always fun and interesting to think about where the Web is headed.
- Soapbox Now in Public Beta; Microsoft's YouTube is released to the masses. Add it to the list.
- Google to sell additional space for Gmail users?; makes sense for power users, although for PR reasons Google may just want to keep just raising the cap slightly over time - so that the perception of Gmail as a free webmail service isn't affected, especially since it's finally open to the world.
- Index Ventures Closes €350M Fund; with a focus on building global companies (such as Skype, Netvibes, Last.fm), Index is one of the most interesting VC firms around right now - and they're based in Europe. They also announced today the addition of former Skype global marketing VP Saul Klein as a venture partner.
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus
Understanding your audience
is the key to success in any business - including blogging. Lately the Read/WriteWeb
authors have been discussing what it is that keeps readers coming back here. Our recent poll
indicated that most of you come back to this blog for Analysis and
Reviews. We are thrilled to hear this, because we focus a lot on those
two things.
But the poll results got us wondering about which posts in particular are the most popular? And we're not talking about simple page views - we want to know what content you actually liked. In the web 1.0 world, understanding what people liked was a voodoo science. Luckily, in these days of blogs and social software, there are fairly definitive ways of measuring what people like. Comments on posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Technorati links and of course Diggs, are all entries into the fascinating world of social popularity. So we decided to put our investigative hat on and do a deep dive on Read/WriteWeb popular posts.
The obvious place to look for popular posts is in the Read/WriteWeb archives. We looked for the most commented-on posts. Below are the posts that had at least 50 comments:
While YouTube and online
video is all the rage currently, I often wonder if there's anything on these video
websites other than mentos-coke
explosions and bad singing.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy YouTube as much as the next person - but I am also a bit
artsy-fartsy, so I like to see artistic stuff being done on the Web too. One such project
is Stray Cinema, which describes itself as "an open
source film project".
Stray Cinema invites people to create short films, based on raw footage that was filmed in London on a digital camera. The idea is that participants download the footage and edit parts of it into their own 2 minute film. Links to free editing software is provided - e.g. Avid, Windows Movie Maker, Video Edit Magic and Wax. The films are then uploaded onto YouTube and embedded into the Stray Cinema website.
Written by Sramana Mitra
I have written a few pieces already addressing the disjointed nature of the web, whereby, you go one place for content, another for community, and a third for commerce, the most notable of these is the popular, 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula.
Let’s quickly recap the terminology:
3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search
This, I submit, is the formula for the future: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).
Web 2.0 has been a nichy phenomenon with hundred and thousands of microcap efforts addressing one of the Cs, lately, Community being the most popular force, producing companies like MySpace, Facebook, Piczo, Xanga, and Flixster.
In Web 1.0, Commerce had been the driving force, that produced companies like Netflix, BlueNile, Amazon, and eBAY. It had also resulted in the Dotcom meltdown.
The same period that is seeing the surge of Web 2.0, has also seen a great deal of investment in Vertical Search, like Sidestep for Travel.
Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context. More recently, Netvibes has raised a lot of buzz, but also lacks the same organizing principle: Context.
In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.
