Wired has an awesome top story today on the world of startups utilizing scraped data from big companies to offer new layers of value for their own users. It's a roughly objective piece that I highly recommend reading but it was also inspiration for me to finally record a screencast on the subject (see below).
I love RSS, probably more than anything on the web. If you're not familiar with the concept, see my very old definition of RSS and my almost-as-old post on teaching people about RSS.
Not every page on the web publishes an RSS feed, though. Thus the need for these wonderful screen scraping tools. I've written about a variety of tools you can use to create a feed for a site or page that doesn't have one. Sometimes, though, you've got to pull out the big guns. In those cases, it's time for Dapper.
An interesting new online video series, called Open Media Web, debuted today. The first episode is an interview with Yahoo's Lucas Gonze - who created music playlisting service WebJay, acquired by Yahoo! in January 2006. The interview was conducted by Chris Messina and Brian Oberkirch. In it Gonze discusses his thoughts on the Open Media Web, on user-respectful business models and coercive business practices, and business opportunities for open systems and data.
Tagging content online is something that doesn't seem to have taken off the way some people expected it to.
Is it too complicated for widespread adoption? Is it too arbitrary to have the impact that formal taxonomies offer? Is it just too much work while you're zipping around the web? Who knows - what's important is that tagging web pages can still be very useful!
I stopped using social bookmarking tools for a big part of 2007 because saving things for my own future reference wasn't enough motivation to invest the time required. In the latter half of the year, though, I've seen what some other people are doing to make it worthwhile again. Here's five and a half ways you can fall in love with tagging URLs again.
Having your service go down on your customers is certainly not a great way to close out the year. But PayPal developers are reporting that subscriptions are down, and have been for a couple of days. This is the second time this year that PayPal has experienced an issue with processing of subscription payments. In September, TechCrunch reported on an outage at PayPal that lasted a few days.
At the risk of jinxing things - I think it's pretty clear that there's a historic shift underway between activities we used to engage in offline and things we now do online. It's no surprise, for example, that CD sales were down 20% this US holiday season while online shopping was up 19%. That's how it works, right? People are moving from one marketplace to another, more virtual one.
Another dataset released this weekend, however, paints a more complex picture. According to the newest study from the Pew Internet and American Life Center - the youngest, most affluent and most internet-connected adults in the US are also the most likely to visit a physical library. It wasn't that way just 10 years ago. How many other legacy industries can you think of today that can say their strongest growth is among young, affluent, power-internet users? Something is going very right in library land. The music business ought to pay close attention to what's going on there.
In August, a month after eBay launch their Craigslist competitor Kijiji in the US, we weren't impressed. "Kijiji has a hard to pronounce/spell name, an uninviting splash page, and a month later major metros like New York and San Francisco (confusingly labeled as "Bay Area") have just a handful of listings," we wrote at then. Rather, we thought Gumtree, a more straight Craigslist clone that was at the time the most popular classifieds site in Britain, would be more successful when eBay brought it stateside. At year's end, it looks like we backed the wrong horse.
2007 was an eventful year in Web Technology, with the rise of Facebook, some frenzied acquisitions from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and of course the iPhone. To round out the year (and put an end to the December lists!) here is a look at what we think were the 10 biggest Web tech stories of the year. They're ordered in terms of technology impact and innovation - however it's a subjective list, so let us know in the comments what you think should be in there.
This post doubles as the final Weekly Wrapup of 2007 -- it's been a great year and all the best everyone for 2008! Here's looking forward to more Web innovation and startup success in '08!
2007 has been a very busy year for ReadWriteWeb. We started the year with just one daily writer (yours truly!), a couple of regular feature writers (Alex Iskold and Emre Sokullu) and the occasional guest writer. We ended the year with 2 new lead writers and 3 more blogs (more on that below).
Of course we have more plans for expansion in 2008. But as we're nearing the end of 2007, I thought I'd pick out 12 of my favorite posts over the past year - one for each month. These weren't necessarily the ones with the most page views, but they were significant to me and for RWW. I hope they also show the flavor of this year.
Our network blog AltSearchEngines has been nominated for 3 Search Blog Awards at Search Engine Journal. ASE is up for:
Best Search Engine Research Blog
Breakout Blog of 2007
Most Giving Search Blogger (for editor Charles Knight)
Like everyone else YouTube has an end of the year list, but there's something a little strange about all the media coverage today on the "top YouTube videos of 2007." These aren't the most viewed videos of the year. They are YouTube's selection of the "most memorable."
The most popular videos on YouTube this year were a bunch of major label music videos - not the user generated content the site would like to be known for. Ultimately there's plenty of room for both, but let's get our story straight.
