Of course our list is subjective, so please leave a comment if we missed one of your favorites. Also let us know your thoughts on social networks going mobile. We've written before that MySpace, Facebook, and MSN are the leading mobile services - and March stats indicated that MySpace is the leader. But surely there will be one or two unknowns who rise to capture this nascent market. So with that in mind, here we go...

Dada

Dada is a mobile SNS that enables users to update personal blogs with pictures and video, download mobile entertainment, connect with and meet other local singles in real time and stay in contact with all their friends. Dada can be used on both PC and mobile, and dada.net is its portal destination page. The 3 main products within the portal are Dada Dating, Dada Life (personal space and social networking), and Mobile Entertainment.

See: Dada Leads Mobile Social Networking Charge

Strands

Recommendations company Strands started out as a music discovery mobile social networking service. Its mobile features include a mobile Web portal, a personalized radio station, and a personal version of partyStrands (its service for party organizers, bars, clubs and DJs). Strands' mobile social networking service basically enables its users to find music and network with their friends via their mobile phones.

See: MyStrands Revamp - More Integration Between Mobile, Online and Physical Worlds

Itsmy

The itsmy.com mobile community wants to be MySpace for your phone. By connecting people and content in both the U.S. and E.U., itsmy has already gathered up more than 1 million registered mobile users with 4 million mobile home and content pages and continues to grow. Recently, itsmy announced they've now launched 100,000 personal mobile TV channels - one for each of its top 10% of content-uploading customers.

See: itsmy Launches Personal Mobile Broadcasting

Frengo

In April mobile social networking company Frengo released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending support for the Open Social and Facebook platforms to the mobile phone, the Frengo toolkit allows developers to monetize applications via the company's social advertising platform or via premium SMS.

See: Frengo Launches Mobile Open Social Toolkit

Twango

In July 2007 Nokia acquired the media sharing service Twango. Twango combines online storage with social networking, allowing users to organize and share photos, videos and other personal media. ReadWriteWeb wrote an in-depth profile of Twango in January '07, in a post entitled Twango Tackles Lucrative Media Sharing Market. Nokia planned to use Twango to enable users to share multimedia content through their desktop and mobile devices.

See: Nokia Acquires Media Sharing Startup Twango

Shozu

Shozu is not strictly speaking a social network, but it enables you to share your videos and photos via your mobile phone - e.g. from your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. RWW reader Honor said in a past post that "it allows me to send the pictures I take with my n80 to Facebook and share with my friends, or email people pictures while I am at an event, shopping for stuff for them etc..."

The final 4 services are from Corvida's post on ReadWriteWeb entitled: The Future of Mobile Social Networks: 4 Promising Services

Brightkite

We recently profiled Brightkite as a winning mobile social network in the arena. Brightkite allows for your network of friends to keep track of where others may be at any moment. Since no GPS is required, users can send updates to the service via text messaging or email, to update their profile with location updates, pictures, and notes. With a host of privacy settings to prevent any form of stalking, Twitter users are increasingly using the network to update friends with status locations sent to their Twitter streams. Brightkite may be one of the best mobile networks to use, especially when going to a conference or big event in town.

Zyb

Taking a different approach from Brightkite, Zyb aims to be a mobile contact organizer for your social network. While we already have our address books for this, Zyb looks to provide a way for you to backup and synchronize your contacts online. You can store your phone numbers, calendar and texts, manage this information online, and transfer your information to a new phone if there ever comes a time. You can also use Zyb to find out who has you in their phones as a contact and even discover friends of friends. Think of Zyb as an expansion on your Facebook pictures and contacts, only more mobile.

Groovr

Groovr is your mobile network's night out on the town. Post a picture, message, or video to your Groovr profile and have it sent to all your friends too. Instant chat? Groovr's got you covered. However, some of these features are redundant. Can't we already send messages, pictures, and videos to our friends without a third party? The only feature we found remotely unique is a city's Explore page on Groovr. All of your posted items are sent to the corresponding cities Explore page. Here's a peek at San Francisco on Groovr:

Fon11

Developed by MoBlast Technologies, Fon11 could become the hottest mobile social network for the iPhone. With a nice UI (of course) and great features like the ability to see just how far away your contacts are from you, availability status messages, visibility settings and more, it seems Fon11 has a lot more to offer than the rest of the pack. Fon11 has already been ported to Android and Nokia Web Runtime with development plans in the works for J2ME and Windows Mobile platforms. While GPS remains an issue through no fault of Moblast, we've been assured that there are many strategies in development to find a resolution.

We hope you enjoyed this look at 10 interesting and exciting mobile social networks. The information in this post came from a variety of past ReadWriteWeb articles and we will continue to explore this promising market. In the meantime, please list your favorite mobile social networks in the comments below.

See also: Mobile Web Trends & Products, March '08 Update

EtherPad acknowledges that Google Docs already allows for a similar kind of collaboration, but compared to EtherPad, Google Docs is clunky and slow when you just want to collaborate on a simple text document.

EtherPad would be a great tool if you want to keep collaborative notes during a conference call or meeting, but you could also use it to draft or edit text for a press release or email collaboratively.

No Sign-Up

EtherPad, for example, doesn't require you to sign-up before you start working on your document. You can also just share your workspace's URL with your co-workers and they, too, don't have to sign up. Indeed, you can't even sign up for the service, which may become a bit of a problem if you want to go back to a document you worked on earlier but don't remember the randomly assigned URL.

Google Docs requires you to send an email invitation to all your collaborators, and updates to documents don't appear in real-time.

Features

EtherPad also has a versioning system that allows you, or anybody else with access to your workspace, to save the document at any time.

Developers who want to share code might also find this a useful tool, as it can highlight JavaScript syntax. Looking at EtherPad's heritage, it becomes clear why the developers added this feature. The service was developed by AppJet, an online web programming platform, and is basically a showcase for the next version of AppJet's tools, but was mainly created because the developers at AppJet were looking for a tool that had EtherPad's functionality but weren't able to find one.

Verdict

As is often the case, the most useful tools are those that have a relatively restricted feature set but allow users the freedom to use them as they see fit. EtherPad is one of these services and it will probably become a standard tool for us very soon.

You can find a screencast of the product here, but given that you don't have to sign up for it, you may just as well try it out for yourself (or join this workspace we already created).

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. While we here at RWW are very proud to have climbed to the #14 spot in the Top 100 most linked-to blogs overall in the Technorati Index (look out Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for everyday use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable anymore.

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.

Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.

Technorati

Pros:

The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.

Cons:

After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.

The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.

The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.

Del.icio.us

Pros:

We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

There's a huge amount of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There are also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.

Cons:

Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.

Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URL much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heartbroken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.

StumbleUpon

Pros:

StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, and an algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.

Cons:

It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category. The search results page is really random-looking; good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.

Google Reader Recommendations

Pros:

Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled only with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.

Cons:
Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech-focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.

AideRSS

Pros:

I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, Diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche-specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.

Cons:

The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.

Ask.com Blogsearch

Pros:

Ask has the best blog search on the web. It uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche-specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.

Cons:
Ask does get overloaded sometimes and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't rely on it alone. Ask Blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.

Conclusion

See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.

What do you use for this kind of research? I'd love to know.

But we're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where web technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one web era is usurped by another.

Of course this last happened when Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly Media in about 2004. Luckily not long before that ReadWriteWeb was born (early 2003). So ReadWriteWeb has been documenting Web 2.0 ever since. Over the past couple of years, we've been focusing on other, perhaps more meaningful, trends - Semantic Web, recommendation technologies, websites becoming web services, Mobile Web and more. We've documented these meta trends in a number of big posts, some of which are in our Best of ReadWriteWeb page and copied here:

• Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond
• What's Next on the Web: a ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008
• 2008 Web Predictions
• 10 Future Web Trends
• 10 More Future Web Trends

The Welcome Return of Innovation

Although we'll continue to see the success stories of Web 2.0 grow and perhaps prosper - social networking, mashups, user generated content, etc - now is the time for innovation. I'm not stating anything revolutionary there, because it's an old cliche that tech innovation thrives in times of recession. Nat Torkington of O'Reilly Radar put this into the context of Web 2.0 recently:

"During boom times, companies direct development and occupy great talent with at best evolutionary improvements over the state of the art. Companies are great chasers of new things, but aren't great at making new things. A recession means technologists cease to be paid vast amounts to duplicate the work of others. The Great Tech Bust of Ought Two gave us 37Signals, Flickr, and del.icio.us and there's a strong argument to be made that many companies spent the next six years chasing what they created."

So we can expect to see a welcome return to web innovation in 2008/09, along the lines of what Flickr and 37Signals created back in the early days of Web 2.0. However, web entrepreneurs will need to make adjustments due to the economic climate. Many people have already noted that a re-focus on the bottom line of your business is key, which we discuss below. But perhaps just as importantly, as Nat pointed out, there is an opportunity to take more advantage of open source technologies and cheaper cloud computing infrastructure.

Yes, Tighten Your Belts, But Open Your Minds Too...

In the past week some high profile VCs have been preaching belt tightening as the primary response to the economy. More than a few people have expressed cynicism about this advice, given the hype and party-throwing days of Web 2.0. New York VC Fred Wilson wrote a post today, partly in response to a comment Bernard left on his blog, in which he defends the advice he and other VCs have been giving since the financial crisis got going. Basically that advice has been to batten down the hatches, reduce spending and, in Fred's words, "act responsibly and make sure we all survive to fight another day".

It's all common sense advice, especially since Web 2.0 has been predominantly about consumer apps. I'm certainly no economist, but it makes sense that in a tight credit market, consumer spending will reduce - which will impact heavily on consumer web apps, and trickle through to other parts of the ecosystem.

But I'd love to see technologists, entrepreneurs and VCs take a longer term view of this crisis as well. Sramana Mitra wrote a great post at Forbes outlining some of the opportunities for innovation. In an "Open Letter to the Leaders of Silicon Valley", Sramana first gave some background on the innovation that led to Web 2.0 and followed up with a challenge to create technology for education, health care, social security. As an example, she wrote about these opportunities in healthcare and education:

"As the smart-phone movement marches on, led by Steve Jobs' iPhone, can we not create seamless bridges between doctors, patients and insurance providers that can reduce the $250 billion expenditure in health care administration?

And on the Internet, can we not create a body of standardized content and methodology for teachers all over the U.S.--or the world--that includes parents in the process and engages children via "edutainment," the same way MySpace and "World of Warcraft" engage kids?"

Tim O'Reilly has been on a similar mission ever since his speech at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year, for startups to tackle 'big challenges'. His core message is to "work on stuff that matters."

What's Next... Let Us Know in the Comments!

We at ReadWriteWeb have been covering mainstream web applications and things like health 2.0 this year. But we've only just scratched the surface, just as have most startups and Internet companies. As the troubles in the economy begin to affect the tech world, we'll be re-doubling our efforts to document what we hope is an exciting new era of web innovation. There are tough times ahead, but equally there are opportunities.

In the best spirit of Web 2.0, let's start by asking you to comment on what opportunities in web technology you forsee over the next year or so. Please leave a comment and let's get a healthy, optimistic - but realistic - discussion started. To provide a bit of inspiration, I've embedded below our stock presentation What's Next on the Web? Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond (circa December '08).

Note: click here and then click 'full' (bottom right) to view full screen and enable the links inside the presentation.

VMware, a company known for their virtualization software for the desktop and datacenter, recently announced their plans to bring that software to mobile phones through their new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). The software is built on technology the company acquired from Trango Virtual Processors just last month. With this new technology, you would no longer have to carry both a work phone and a personal phone. Instead, your I.T. department could just deploy the corporate phone's profile to your personal device where it would then run in a virtualized space.

The VMware MVP is software that can be embedded on a mobile phone to provide the platform for running a virtualized mobile OS and its accompanying applications. VMware claims that this software would run efficiently even on low-power-consuming and memory-constrained phones.

For mobile phone users, the benefits of mobile phone virtualization mean they can run multiple profiles on one device. It also means that an entire mobile phone's persona - including applications, photos, videos, music, email, etc. - can be easily ported from one device to the next.

For manufacturers, virtualization means they can deploy their software to a wide variety of phones without having to worry about the underlying hardware. It would also allow handset vendors to run their "trusted services" like DRM, authentication, and billing in tamper-proof virtualized environments.

According to Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, virtualization for mobile devices is the next big thing. "We predict that by 2012, more than 50% of new smart phones shipped will be virtualized," she says.

Of course the unanswered question here is the one everyone wants to know: will VMware's MVP run as an iPhone app?

Editor's note: Looking back over 2008, there were some posts on ReadWriteWeb that did not get the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So in this end-of-year series, called Redux, we're resurrecting some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

Web sites are only one kind of presence that companies can have today. Social Networks like Facebook and MySpace, mobile platforms like iPhone and Blackberry, browser extensions and RIA Applications all have an equal - sometimes considerably larger - share of users attention. Figuring out which presence should be delivered by the website vs. a third party is an important question that each company should ask.

User Experience is King

User interface innovation is a major part of the ongoing web revolution. As we've recently written in The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces post, static user interfaces are 'dead'. The new interfaces are simpler and more contextual. Instead of revealing choices upfront, they present them based on user gestures and context. The new user experience is about fluidity.

The innovations have set the bar for UI high. Users demand simplicity and elegance and want to know how to use the product without a manual. They expect the software to work perfectly, for it to be helpful and smart. No company can afford to ignore usability, or it will lose users to someone doing the same product with a better UI.

Today the user experience is not just a set of widgets or a website design. As Leander Kahney explained in his book Inside Steve's Brain, for Steve Jobs design is the function.

This is increasingly true about any modern web application. Users perceive all elements of the service as the service itself. They don't distinguish particular widgets inside Twitter or Twitterific; the vertical conversational faceroll defines Twitter. The way the service is delivered is why users like it.

Why Controlling User Experience is Important?

Each service that we love, whether Twitter or Digg or Flickr or del.icio.us, has its particular look, feel and philosophy. Passionate users enjoy these services because of the elements, choices and collective experience that the services deliver. The clients built on top of the API would not necessarily channel the secret sauce. For example, RIA applications for Twitter are built for people who don't work for Twitter and don't regularly communicate with the Twitter team. They're not going to preserve the user experience philosophy.

Third party clients create new user experiences, which are at times confusing. As a user, on web, desktop and iPhone, ideally you'd like to experience the service the same way, but if the iPhone application is delivered by someone else the experience might not be the same.

In addition to user experience, there's the issue of branding. Larger companies are strict about their identity. When a couple of guys build an Amazon application for iPhone, they won't pay close attention to Amazon branding. Some will argue it doesn't matter as long as it drives transactions for Amazon. Yes and no. Yes because the users will buy. No because the users will accumulate imperfect user experience and associate this with Amazon, which might add up to a big negative.

Monetization Factor

A strong reason for investing in user experience is monetization. Many consumer services today are monetized via advertising. Having additional presence on different platforms increases the potential volume of advertising.

Put simply, many Twitter clients, like Twitterrific, are already monetizing the service by adding a single ad on top of each result set. If Twitter owned the RIA client, it would be able to monetize it in the same way.

Any service that is transactional or advertising driven benefits from multiple interfaces. Whatever it takes to reach the user to deliver value and drive the transactions is what services have to do. In the world of APIs, we at times forget that service should tap into all its major channels to build the business.

Which Platforms Are Critical?

Which platforms are important to tap into? There are 4 major venues for companies to consider seriously: iPhone, RIA, Facebook and Browser Extensions. All these platform plug into the same audience, but in a different context.

iPhone is great on the go. With the opening of the App Store, increasingly iPhone is going to be our personal computer. RIA clients are popular, particularly among early adopters who want richer, snappier experience compared to the web. Facebook, despite its recent scaling back on the platform, remains a major way to reach mainstream audience. Browser extensions enable the user to access the service from around the web.

Tapping into these platforms is not cheap. Building a specific and correct solution for each platform requires product management, development and testing resources.

If the company has correct API, the exercise is simpler. Instead of duplicating the application, the company builds a client for each platform and benefits from common API and common back-end architecture. It is not trivial to maintain presence in all these places, but it's likely to pay off.

Conclusion

APIs offer an amazing way for companies to scale, to create an ecosystem of innovation and tap into a wider audience. Companies should consider building and managing their presence on major platforms like iPhone, Facebook, RIA and Browsers. The way that people perceive and interact with the service is increasingly important; just rolling out an API and having a third party take care of the client could be dangerous. In addition an opportunity of being in front of the audience driving monetization could be missed.

And now tell us which of your favortire services you want to see build presence on different platforms?

LeFever is the founder of Common Craft and his story is an inspiring one.

Editor's note: Looking back over 2008, there were some posts on ReadWriteWeb that did not get the attention we felt they deserved - whether because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So in this end-of-year series, called Redux, we're resurrecting some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

The History of Common Craft

Common Craft started out as a consultancy focused on creating and teaching organizations about online communities. Lee LeFever left his day job and opened up shop in 2003. He blogged prolifically and worked with a number of large clients in the earliest days of social media.

One of his most notable projects was working with consultant Nancy White on the very successful community Share Your Story, a March of Dimes site where parents with children in the neonatal ICU could find support. Share Your Story is still one of the most successful use cases of niche social networking online.

By 2007 the LeFevers began trying something that many social media consultants and trainers try - they began making videos explaining certain tools and trends emerging online. They tried using white boards and other methods but nothing really stood out - until Sachi LeFever thought to put the white board on the ground, cut out some simple cartoon figures and use a stop motion method of animation.

The Common Craft Show was thus born. April 2007 saw the company's first video in their now famous style, called RSS in Plain English. Though Common Craft's production skills have improved dramatically as they've produced video after video - RSS in Plain English remains the best introduction to RSS on the web.

One month later, Common Craft published a video called Wikis in Plain English.

Two months after this five year old consultancy began producing the simple introductory videos, the LeFevers decided they wanted to dedicate 100% of their time to the series and they stopped doing online community consulting.

Over the next year, Common Craft produced videos for clients, for general interest and for fun on a wide variety of topics. From California School Financing, to the company PR Web, to Zombies in Plain English (not to be confused with the PR Web client video) - the breadth was really impressive.

Hold the Show!

The Common Craft show was a huge success. Inquiries from clients were coming fast and furious, the company saw between five and ten inquiries for custom videos every day. Why have Lee and Sachi decided to stop making custom videos then? We asked them and this is what they told us.

"This was a perfect fit for us - we could work from home, make a good living and work on fun projects with interesting companies and people. And it's been a blast. But soon we started to look at the possibilities. A few things were clear:

1. Custom videos do not scale. We would have to hire people to grow the company and we don't want to hire. We are a two person company.


2. Custom videos are usually promotional. We are more comfortable with education than promotion. Another realization is that promotion is fad-driven and education isn't as much. We see a longer lifespan for our videos in education.


3. Our goal is independence - we want to work for our own goals on our own schedule and maintain a lifestyle that supports us."

What Now?

What is Common Craft going to do instead of making themselves available for hire making custom videos? Lee says that for the past year they've been getting requests three or four times a week for permission to re-use their Plain English videos. The solution they decided on was licensing them for corporate and eductional use.

Common Craft now sells licenses for high-quality, downloadable versions of their explanatory videos. All of their time working is now spent building out the library. Videos are licensed for under $20 for individual use and $350 for site-wide use, like on a company intranet. Commercial licensing, for use on public commercial websites, is the next option the company will be offering.

Of course the video content is available free to anyone online, but Common Craft says that many companies feel far more comfortable paying for official permission to use high quality, unbranded versions. There's certainly no DRM involved. "People want to do the right thing if they know the rules," Lee LeFever says. "Our challenge is to educate people about how we expect our videos to be used. We're lucky to have fans that feel good about supporting us with their purchases. Given limited resources, we would rather spend time educating people on the right thing to do than trying to make the wrong things impossible."

Fortunately, all the social media work the company has done has put them in a place of great prominence regarding the issues they tackle. People love their videos, so they get a lot of links and have excellent search engine ranking.

When the Common Craft Store opened in April, the first video sold within two hours. Last month, video licenses were bought by individuals and organizations in nine countries around the world. The LeFevers report that their customers include Fortune 500 tech, chemical and services companies, school districts and Universities, government agencies, individual consultants and educators.

The store isn't operating in the black yet, but it is covering their business expenses and "a nice chunk of our living expenses." We hope Common Craft can go all the way and support themselves fully with this work. An ad-free business model, developed by two independent creatives, is very inspiring.

Though the videos seem simple, each one takes days to prepare. The hardest part of making them, Lee LeFever says, is really nailing down clear, effective explanations of these concepts. It's a powerful skill set that Lee and Sachi bring to an interesting new market.

We love the fact that there are enough people willing to pay for this kind of content that Common Craft has decided to make it their sole business strategy. We've written here about the most awesome freelance producers of custom screen casts we know but when the LeFevers told us they'd left those ranks we were very curious to hear the details about what they are doing next.

We think their story can inspire anyone who dreams of making a living doing good work and exploring new ways to do business on a changing Internet.

Even worse, the regulations varied from state to state. So he suggested one simple take-away “never, ever call anybody in Nebraska, you will certainly get nailed”. And that was just explaining the situation in America, this expert did not even attempt to explain the complexities of calling globally.

This was a bomb that landed on the consumer telemarketing industry. A similar bomb called Do Not Track may be about to land on the online advertising industry. This article in the New York Times describes an initiative in New York which follows a bill introduced in Connecticut. Europe is already a stickler for privacy and never misses a chance to slow the growth of the big US based global players.

Back in October I suggested that privacy was going to become a bigger issue and that some high profile event would “spook and offend enough people to set the Blogosphere on fire. Then MSM will pick up on the story and then politicians and regulators will jump on board.”

The high profile event was Facebook Beacon. The next “100 years of advertising” as proclaimed by Mark Zuckerberg looked a lot like an Amway scheme to ordinary folk. This was not just big companies abusing your privacy to sell you stuff, it was big companies enlisting your friends to abuse your privacy and sell you stuff.

There are a lot of mixed feelings about privacy in the Blogosphere. Most of us depend on advertising to pay the bills. We are totally public, blogging and twittering away about everything we think and do. To many of us, it is time to “get over it”, the toothpaste is out of the tube, privacy is dead. At the other extreme are the purists, the idealists who don’t need ads to pay the bills (having tenure at a major college takes away that pressure for example). In the middle are a lot of people who know that something is badly broken in the online ad world and something new will come.

The problem is, nobody has the foggiest idea what new ad model will work. That is not for lack of trying. There are lots of incredibly smart people trying to figure this out.

The reason that Do Not Call was such a big deal was that Spam had already killed email marketing. If you want to do push marketing, junk mail is the only intrusive form left. Now that is sad. You really want to kill more trees to avoid getting calls or emails? No, I did not think so. Stop Junk Mail is now a business as well.

Push and pull marketing are the two sides of the direct response industry. With push marketing almost dead, Google re-invented pull marketing with search-driven CPC and the rest, as they say, is history.

SEM is phenomenally powerful in the right hands, but leaves a lot to be desired:

1. The auction model drives prices to a level that is eventually unsustainable for the advertiser.
2. It is not good for branding. So its not that good for the big consumer brand budgets. It works best for a product/service that is low enough to be in the impulse purchase price range but high enough to pay for Adwords. About $100 is ideal.
3. It is open to click fraud.
4. You need a high level of sophistication to use SEM effectively. You need a machine that converts clicks to dollars (ok, Euros would be better) with total consistency, so you can buy Adwords with precision. Together with 1, this makes it out of reach for most small businesses.

So, SEM is great for savvy start-ups with $100 products to sell, but not the mainstream of a) big consumer brands and b) small business? That leaves a lot of money looking for an alternative. The gap between ad dollar spending and online usage is so wide, but rather than getting narrower it looks like it is getting wider. This means that the guys with the ad budgets are holding back because they don’t know where to spend.

All successful new ad models have two things in common:

1. Something new that is dramatically better than current alternatives. Advertisers are conservative, so a new model has to show enormous potential to pry open the budget.
2. Standardization. This has been true of anything from the 30 second slot to banner-sized ads. Advertisers have to know what they can buy and they have to justify their budget in traditional terms.

The big problem is that 1 and 2 conflict. Lets say you are a start-up with a revolutionary new service that attracts a great “audience”. You would be smart to be totally conservative with your ad model (standard CPM and/or CPC). You cannot change the ad industry on your own. On the other hand, if you are a big media company with long established relationships with the big advertisers and their agencies, you also have no motivation to change the CPM status quo.

Google really was in a unique situation. They had a better search engine but CPM was clearly utterly useless as a monetization strategy. And paid search with an auction model fitted perfectly - thanks a ton, Overture!

That combination is unusual. Most of the new web 2.0 services can use CPM to monetize. As Web 2.o ventures don’t pay much for content creation and can get viral adoption, that drives down CPM prices. That’s OK for low cost Web 2.0 ventures even if it leaves a lot of money on the table that could be collected with smarter models. It’s a disaster for traditional media with a higher cost base, but they don’t tend to be the drivers for innovation. So the motivation to innovate is less.

CPM feels like an old media model grafted onto the online world, like talking heads in the early days of TV. CPM is “faith based advertising” that does not move any further to answer Sam Wanamaker’s famous implied question “which 50% of my budget is wasted?”

CPM survived in an HTML page-centric world that mimicked print. In a world with AJAX, rich applications, APIs, mashups, aggregators, mobile and social networks, the question marks related to CPM just keep piling up.

Frogs don’t jump out of water that gradually comes to a boil. If you throw some boiling water in they jump out quickly. The politicians may be about to throw in that boiling water. Do Not Track legislation matters because Behavioral Targeting is currently the best game in town for big budget consumer branding. It is mature, works and all the big Ad Networks have a variant. And Do Not Track will be about as much fun for Behavioral Targeting as Do Not Call is for telemarketing vendors.

Predicting politics is not my game, I find it utterly mysterious. However I think that some variant of Do Not Track legislation is inevitable for two reasons:

1. Ordinary people value privacy (they don’t Blog or Twitter) and nobody has articulated a big win for them to give up privacy. The telemarketing and email vendors tried “but they will miss all these great promotions that my clients are selling” and that did not wash.
2. The industry is not united. There are people such as Doc Searls and his Vendor Relationship Management saying that total re-invention of the ad model is well overdue. That is to be expected. This quote from the NY Times article was more surprising. “Mr. Brodsky ( Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, the sponsor of a New York bill to limit how companies collect data on computer users) says he has asked the Web companies point-blank if they would support legislation similar to what he has proposed. Microsoft gave him a firm "yes,"

The reason I keep coming back to Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), even though it is clearly in the very early stages in the thinking (no real deployable system or even prototype yet), is that it is the only genuinely radical approach that resonates with me as an ordinary user and as a business person. At its most fundamental, VRM echoes Oscar Wilde:

“Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth”

In other words, if privacy is absolutely completely guaranteed, buyers will reveal all their intentions. You don’t have to infer their intentions from a search term or from the last 10 sites they visited. They will explicitly tell you, the seller, what they want. Sam Wanamaker could finally say “my ad dollars are not wasted”.

The people working on VRM recently came up with the concept of the “reverse cookie”. It is perfectly timed for a Do Not Track world. No point in Googling “reverse cookie”, you will get something about Oreos! You, the buyer, set out what you want and your cookie tracks which sellers have what might fit. It sounds a bit like an agent.

VRM is radical. The more mainstream approaches seem to bifurcate into two:

1. The direct response world moves from CPC to CPA (Cost Per Action) to the logical end game of direct revenue share, transaction fees, Cost Per Revenue or whatever we end up calling it. That brings in mainstream small business by making the proposition totally simple - your product costs $100, we will take $25 on every sale, no sale = no fee” and obviously cuts out click fraud. This is a perfect “recession story“.
2. The brand advertising world moves to greater levels of creativity to get engagement when they can no longer rely on thrusting their message on a consumer. We are still way, way early in this game but I suspect it may make advertising, media and marketing the wild, fun place to be it was in the 1960s when TV went mainstream.

Image: Aim and shoot!

In our tests, Mufin often performed better than Apple's Genius feature, but for now, the plugin is only available for Windows.

Fingerprinting

Mufin creates a unique fingerprint for every song in your library when you start the plugin for the first time. You can choose if you want the recommendations to be based on the analysis of 30 second snippets (for fast analysis) or on the whole song (very slow, but highly accurate). Mufin's proprietary algorithms can then create playlists based on the similarities between the songs in your library. In creating these fingerprints, Mufin looks at over 40 characteristics, including tempo, instruments, and rhythm structure.

Apple's algorithms, on the other hand, are hidden in a black box, but seem to be based around the listening and purchasing habits of other users on iTunes.

Mufin's approach means that it will work for any song you may have imported into iTunes, no matter whether it is part of Apple's library or not. Mufin is also agnostic as to what language the songs are in.

Similar to Apple's Genius, the Mufin plugin will also make purchasing recommendations for similar songs that are not yet in your iTunes library and take you right to the iTunes store to listen to the preview or purchase them.

Verdict

Overall, we have come away very impressed with Mufin's recommendations. Judging from what we have seen so far, it may just replace the Genius feature as our preferred way of constructing automatic playlists.

That said, we are still not great fans of Mufin's core web service, which, unlike the plugin, is encumbered by licensing problems and which can only play 30 seconds of most songs (and often can't play the songs at all). The plugin, however, is a clear winner in our eyes.

People increasingly look for reasons to avoid traveling, knowing we will get crowds, intrusive security, a bland sameness everywhere, crumbling infrastructure that could be dangerous and to top it all a smidgeon of guilt about our carbon footprint. When travel looks like fun, it is “off the beaten track”, in some place that does not look like everywhere else, a genuinely local place.

Living “off the grid” was once a dream for a few wild hippies, toking in yurts in the Mojave desert. Now we can see three “straws in the wind” that indicate that this is turning mainstream:

1. Silicon Valley A List VCs are financing the solar energy products to enable all of us to cut off our dependency on the electricity grid.

2. The work from home generation increasingly takes a world without commuting to Dilbert cubicles for granted; reducing our dependency on highways and mass transportation. In that more local world, we can get about by foot, bicycle or maybe electric car; we are also more likely to interact with and care about local shopkeepers and other suppliers.

3. Consumers increasingly value local and hand-made as special, for which they are willing to pay a premium; consumers want the opposite of mass-produced. We increasingly distrust the industrial food that comes from the Meatrix and a book about sustainable agriculture hits the bestseller lists. Local food is the new black, “better than organic“.

Taken together, these trends are being referred to as re-localization. An alternative name is Local 2.0. The difference is subtle but real.

Local 2.0 is clearly Web 2.0 type thinking. The big focus is on location based services. The classic use case is a traveler, a stranger in a strange land who has just landed and wants to find something or somebody (who might help them find something). As we all rush around the country/world pitching to clients/investors/partners or hanging out at cool un-conferences, that is an important use case; but it is different from Re-localization.

Re-localization is about locals. It is about people who like being in one place and interacting with neighbors. This does not make it a closed world. Local shopkeepers/restaurants/cafes welcome the stranger/traveler/tourist with their credit card. Realtors, plumbers and all kinds of small businesses welcome the newcomer, who may put down roots here and become a regular customer.

In Web 1.0, these local businesses were viewed as roadkill. Everything would be ordered online and delivered by air and trucks from giant automated warehouses. Oops, lousy economics; plus increasing consumer push-back. So now Web 2.0 start-ups want to “partner” with these local businesses.

“Partner” is a term we fling about carelessly in technology/media circles; it is a thoroughly devalued term. Use it with a local shopkeeper and she will ask you how many dollars you plan to invest with her in this new business that you will jointly own.

What we really mostly mean is “we would like to sell you some advertising”. After delivering your pitch for a paradigm-changing local ad service, you will hear something about Yellow Pages or Classified Ads in the local paper; well, you would hear that if you were actually in conversation. Many will tell you they don’t bother - “the locals already know me”. Others will say they have always used the local paper/directory “because Harry is a great guy, no idea if it works, but don’t plan to change”. So then you switch your pitch to something about visitors and the pitch degenerates into something pretty marginal.

Selling to real small businesses at a local level, means having a little cheat sheet to remind you of three basic facts:

1. People don’t live online. Re-localization is all about human interaction face to face. If you think community = online…ahem, get a life! MeetUp looks like a big winner in this environment. Mobile is a big deal, but you will be hard pressed to offer something more compelling than hitting autodial to tell your friend what cafe you are in.
2. Small business owners are traders. Trade with them. Buy from them or sell something to them that they can sell to their customers. I know that sounds kinda basic. To put it in fancier media/technology language, there is a value chain that leads from CPM to CPC to CPA to transaction fees. Ebay gets that and they are as mainstream as it gets.
3. When the local business wants to look at an online alternative to Yellow Pages/local paper, Craigslist is right there and virtually free and they have crossed the chasm. Count me a skeptic of the local ad market; Craigslist took the air out of that one.

Here is the little secret. Local business people are plenty smart (even if they don’t know what Drupal is) and the Web just made them smarter. They can get together with other small businesses to compete more effectively against the Fortune 500 behemoths who turned America into a shopping mall. They will use the Net to trade with their peers; enable that in some way and you may have a winner.

The Net is also critical to re-localization because it brings the “distant independent digital worker” who relies on broadband and smart tools to communicate with colleagues/partners/clients globally. They bring new revenue into the local economy.

What do you think? Do you like your local bookshop or are you Amazon only? If you ran a local small business, what Net based service would you find most useful?

Image by StuffEyeSee

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4-minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.

We hope readers will add comments with some of your favorite Greasemonkey scripts for people to check out as well.

What Is Greasemonkey?

Greasemonkey is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to insert Javascript into the local display of web pages in your browser. Nothing changes for anyone else, but images, links or text can be added or hidden automatically when you visit a web page that a script has been written for. Developers have written these little scripts to customize or improve the way different websites are experienced. It's a powerful, lightweight platform that we think you'll really enjoy using.

For non-technical users, "script" may be an intimidating word, but we think of it as a plug-in for the plug-in. The user experience is that simple.

How Do I Use It?

Below, you'll find a 4-minute screencast walking you through the process of setting up Greasemonkey and running some of our favorite scripts. Links and text are below the video. RSS readers can click here to view the video.

Thanks to Screencast.com for hosting the video above. (Flash version)

Install the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in.

Find scripts to install. Most are at Userscripts.org but the ones we reference in the video above are:
AutoPagerize
Better GMail 2
FriendFeed User Profiles
FriendFeed Better Recommended
Greased Lightbox

There's a whole room in FriendFeed dedicated to sharing and discussing new Greasemonkey scripts.

We wrote about Greasemonkey Scripts for the Social Media Addict in May, but the options available grow fast and furious.

Questions? Suggestions?

If there's anything unclear about this, let us know and we or our readers will respond to questions. Likewise, if there are Greasemonkey scripts you think readers here should be sure to see - let us know what they are.

In a recent interview Tim Berners-Lee pointed out that the infrastructure to power the Semantic Web is already here. ReadWriteWeb's founder, Richard MacManus, even picked it to be the number one trend in 2008. And rightly so. Not only are the bits of infrastructure now in place, but we are also seeing startups and larger corporations working hard to deliver end user value on top of this sophisticated set of technologies.

The Semantic Web means many things to different people, because there are a lot of pieces to it. To some, the Semantic Web is the web of data, where information is represented in RDF and OWL. Some people replace RDF with Microformats. Others think that the Semantic Web is about web services, while for many it is about artificial intelligence - computer programs solving complex optimization problems that are out of our reach. And business people always redefine the problem in terms of end user value, saying that whatever it is, it needs to have simple and tangible applications for consumers and enterprises.

The disagreement is not accidental, because the technology and concepts are broad. Much is possible and much is to be imagined.

1. Bottom-Up and Top-Down

We have written a lot about the different approaches to the Semantic Web - the classic bottom-up approach and the new top-down one. The bottom-up approach is focused on annotating information in pages, using RDF, so that it is machine readable. The top-down approach is focused on leveraging information in existing web pages, as is, to derive meaning automatically. Both approaches are making good progress.

A big win for the bottom-up approach was recent announcement from Yahoo! that their search engine is going to support RDF and microformats. This is a win-win-win for publishers, for Yahoo!, and for customers - publishers now have an incentive to annotate information because Yahoo! Search will be taking advantage of it, and users will then see better, more precise results.

Another recent win for the bottom-up approach was the announcement of the Semantify web service from Dapper (previous coverage). This offering will enable publishers to add semantic annotations to existing web pages. The more tools like Semantify that pop up, the easier it will be for publishers to annotate pages. Automatic annotation tools combined with the incentive to annotate the pages is going to make the bottom-up approach more compelling.

But even if the tools and incentive exist, to make the bottom-up approach widespread is difficult. Today, the magic of Google is that it can understand information as is, without asking people to fully comply with W3C standards of SEO optimization techniques. Similarly, top-down semantic tools are focused on dealing with imperfections in existing information. Among them are the natural language processing tools that do entity extraction - such as the Calais and TextWise APIs that recognize people, companies, places, etc. in documents; vertical search engines, like ZoomInfo and Spock, which mine the web for people; technologies like Dapper and BlueOrganizer, which recognize objects in web pages; and Yahoo! Shortcuts, Snap and SmartLinks, which recognize objects in text and links.

[Disclosure: Alex Iskold is founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue, which makes BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks.]

Top-down technologies are racing forward despite imperfect information. And, of course, they benefit from the bottom-up annotations as well. The more annotations there are, the more precise top-down technologies will get - because they will be able to take advantage of structured information as well.

2. Annotation Technologies: RDF, Microformats, and Meta Headers

Within the bottom-up approach to annotation of data, there are several choices for annotation. They are not equally powerful, and in fact each approach is a trade off between simplicity and completeness. The most comprehensive approach is RDF - a powerful, graph-based language for declaring things, and attributes and relationships between things. In a simplistic way, one can think of RDF as the language that allows expressing truths like: Alex IS human (type expression), Alex HAS a brain (attribute expression), and Alex IS the father of Alice, Lilly, and Sofia (relationship expression). RDF is powerful, but because it is highly recursive, precise, and mathematically sound, it is also complex.

At present, most use of RDF is for interoperability. For example, the medical community uses RDF to describe genomic databases. Because the information is normalized, the databases that were previously silos can now be queried together and correlated. In general, in addition to semantic soundness, the major benefit of RDF is interoperability and standardization, particularly for enterprises, as we will discuss below.

Microformats offer a simpler approach by adding semantics to existing HTML documents using specific CSS styles. The metadata is compact and is embedded inside the actual HTML. Popular microformats are hCard, which describes personal and company contact information, hReview, which adds meta information to review pages, and hCalendar, which is used to describe events.

Microformats are gaining popularity because of their simplicity, but they are still quite limiting. There is no way to describe type hierarchies, which the classic semantic community would say is critical. The other issue is that microformats are somewhat cryptic, because the focus is to keep the annotations to a minimum. This, in turn, brings up another question of whether embedding metadata into the view (HTML) is a good idea. The question is: what happens if the underlying data changes when someone makes a copy of the HTML document? Nevertheless, despite these issues, microformats are gaining popularity because they are simple. Microformats are currently used by Flickr, Eventful, and LinkedIn; and many other companies are looking to adopt microformats, particularly because of the recent Yahoo! announcement.

An even simpler approach is to put meta data into the meta headers. This approach has been around for a while and it is a shame that it has not been widely adopted. As an example, the New York Times recently launched extended annotations for its news pages. The benefit of this approach is that it works great for pages that are focused on a topic or a thing. For example, a news page can be described with a set of keywords, geo location, date, time, people, and categories. Another example would be for book pages. O'Reilly.com has been putting book information into the meta headers, describing the author, ISBN, and category of the book.

Despite the fact that all these approaches are different, they are also somewhat complementary; and each of them is helpful. The more annotations there are in web pages, the more standards are implemented, and the more discoverable and powerful the information becomes.

3. Consumer and Enterprise

Yet another dimension of the conversation about the Semantic Web is the focus on consumer and enterprise applications. In the consumer arena we have been looking for a Killer App - something that delivers tangible and simple consumer value. People simply do not care that a product is built on the Semantic Web; all they are looking for is utility and usefulness.

Up until recently, the challenge has been that the Semantic Web focused on rather academic issues - like annotating information to make it machine-readable. The promise was that once the information is annotated and the web becomes one big giant RDF database, then exciting consumer applications would come. The skeptics, however, have been pointing out that first there needs to be a compelling use case.

Some consumer applications based on the Semantic Web: generic and vertical search, contextual shortcuts and previews, personal information management systems, semantic browsing tools. All of these applications are in their early days and have a long way to go before being truly compelling for the average web user. Still, even if these applications succeed, consumers will not be interested in knowing about the underlying technology - so there is really no marketing play for the Semantic Web in the consumer space.

Enterprises are a different story for a couple of reasons. First, enterprises are much more used to techno speak. To them utilizing semantic technologies translates into being intelligent and that, in turn, is good marketing. 'Our products are better and smarter because we use the Semantic Web' sounds like a good value proposition for the enterprise.

But even above the marketing speak, RDF solves a problem of data interoperability and standards. This "Tower of Babel" situation has been in existence since the early days of software. Forget semantics; just a standard protocol, a standard way to pass around information between two programs, is hugely valuable in the enterprise.

RDF offers a way to communicate using XML-based language, which on top of it has sound mathematical elements to enable semantics. This sounds great, and even the complexity of RDF is not going to stop enterprises from using it. However, there is another problem that might stop it - scalability. Unlike relational databases, which have been around for ages and have been optimized and tuned, XML-based databases are still not widespread. In general, the problem is in the scale and querying capabilities. Like object-oriented database technologies of the late '90s, XML-based databases hold a lot of promise, but we have yet to see them in action in a big way.

4. Semantic APIs

With the rise of Semantic Web applications, we are also seeing the rise of Semantic APIs. In general, these web services take as an input unstructured information and find entities and relationships. One way to think of these services is mini natural language processing tools, which are only concerned with a subset of the language.

The first example is the Open Calais API from Reuters that we have covered in two articles here and here. This service accepts raw text and returns information about people, places, and companies found in the document. The output not only returns the list of found matches, but also specifies places in the document where the information is found. Behind Calais is a powerful natural language processing technology developed by Clear Forest (now owned by Reuters), which relies on algorithms and databases to extract entities out of text. According to Reuters, Calais is extensible, and it is just a matter of time before new entities will be added.

Another example is the SemanticHacker API from TextWise, which is offering a one million dollar prize for the best commercial semantic web application developed on top of it. This API classifies information in documents into categories called semantic signatures. Given a document, it outputs entities or topics that the document is about. It is kind of like Calais, but also delivers a topical hierarchy, where the actual objects are leafs.

Another semantic API is offered by Dapper - a web service which facilitates the extraction of structure from unstructured HTML pages. Dapper works by enabling users to define attributes of an object based on the bits of the page. For example, a book publisher might define where the information about author, ISBN and number of pages is on a typical book page and the Dapper application would then create a recognizer for any page on the publisher site and enable access to it via REST API.

While this seems backwards from an engineering point of view, Dapper's technology is remarkably useful in the real world. In a typical scenario, for websites that do not have clean APIs to access their information, even non-technical people can build an API in minutes with Dapper. This is a powerful way of quickly turning websites into web services.

5. Search Technologies

Perhaps the first significant blow to the Semantic Web has been the inability thus far to improve search. The premise that a semantic understanding of pages leads to vastly better search has yet to be validated. The two main contenders, Hakia and PowerSet, have made some progress, but not enough. The problem is that Google's algorithm, which is based on statistical analysis, deals just fine with semantic entities like people, cities, and companies. When asked What is the capital of France? Google returns a good enough answer.

There is a growing realization that marginal improvement in search might not be enough to beat Google or to declare search the killer app for the Semantic Web. Likely, understanding semantics is helpful but not sufficient to build a better search engine. A combination of semantics, innovative presentation, and memory of who the user is, will be necessary to power the next generation search experience.

Alternative approaches also attempt to overlay semantics on top of the search results. Even Google ventures into verticals by partitioning the results into different categories. The consumer can then decide which type of answer they are interested in.

Yet search is a game that is far from won and a lot of semantic companies are really trying to raise the bar. There may be another twist to the whole search play - contextual technologies, as well as semantic databases, could lead to qualitatively better results. And so we turn to these next.

6. Contextual Technologies

We are seeing an increasing number of contextual tools entering the consumer market. Contextual navigation does not just improve search, but rather shortcuts it. Applications like Snap or Yahoo! Shortcuts, and SmartLinks "understand" the objects inside text and links and bring relevant information right into the user's context. The result is that the user does not need to search at all.

Thinking about this more deeply, one realizes that contextual tools leverage semantics in a much more interesting way. Instead of trying to parse what a user types into the search box, contextual technologies rely on analyzing the content. So the meaning is derived in a much more precise way - or rather, there is less guessing. The contextual tools then offer the users relevant choices, each of which leads to a correct result. This is fundamentally different from trying to pull the right results from a myriad of possible choices resulting from a web search.

We are also seeing an increasing number of contextual technologies make their way into the browser. Top-down semantic technologies need to work without publishers doing anything; and so to infer context, contextual technologies integrate into the browser. Firefox's recommended extensions page features a number of contextual browsing solutions - Interclue, ThumbStrips, Cooliris, and BlueOrganizer (from my own company).

The common theme among these tools is the recognition of information and the creation of specific micro contexts for the users to interact with that information.

7. Semantic Databases

Semantic databases are another breed of semantic applications focused on annotating web information to be more structured. Twine, a product of Radar Networks and currently in private beta, focuses on building a personal knowledge base. Twine works by absorbing unstructured content in various forms and building a personal database of people, companies, things, locations, etc. The content is sent to Twine via a bookmarklet, via email, or manually. The technology needs to evolve more, but one can see how such databases can be useful once the kinks are worked out. One of the very powerful applications that could be built on top of Twine, for example, is personalized search - a way to filter the results of any search engine based on a particular individual.

It is worth noting that Radar Networks has spent a lot of time getting the infrastructure right. The underlying representation is RDF and is ready to be consumed by other semantic web services. But a big chunk of the core algorithms, the ones that are dealing with entity extraction, are being commoditized by Semantic Web APIs. Reuters offers this as an API call, for example, and so moving forward, Twine won't need to be concerned with how to do that.

Another big player in the semantic databases space is a company called Metaweb, which created Freebase. In its present form, Freebase is just a fancier and more structured version of Wikipedia - with RDF inside and less information in total. The overall goal of Freebase, however, is to build a Wikipedia equivalent of the world's information. Such a database would be enormously powerful because it could be queried exactly - much like relational databases. So once again the promise is to build much better search.

But the problem is, how can Freebase keep up with the world? Google indexes the Internet daily and grows together with the web. Freebase currently allows editing of information by individuals and has bootstrapped by taking in parts of Wikipedia and other databases, but in order to scale this approach, it needs to perfect the art of continuously taking in unstructured information from the world, parsing it, and updating its database.

The problem of keeping up with the world is common to all database approaches, which are effectively silos. In the case of Twine, there needs to be continuous influx of user data, and in the case of Freebase there needs to be influx of data from the web. These problems are far from trivial and need to be solved successfully in order for the databases to be useful.

Conclusion

With any new technology it is important to define and classify things. The Semantic Web is offering an exciting promise: improved information discoverability, automation of complex searches, and innovative web browsing. Yet the Semantic Web means different things to different people. Indeed, its definitions in the enterprise and consumer spaces are different, and there are different means to a common end - top-down vs. bottom-up and microformats vs. RDF. In addition to these patterns, we are observing the rise of semantic APIs and contextual browsing tools. All of these are in their early days but hold a big promise to fundamentally change the way we interact with information on the web.

What do you think about Semantic Web Patterns? What trends are you seeing and which applications are you waiting for? And if you work with semantic technologies in the enterprise, please share your experiences with us in the comments below.

Blue Spruce is a project within IBM that is only about 5 months old. Up till now it hasn't been shown publicly. Blue Spruce isn't yet complete, but conceptually it is two different things:

• Project Blue Spruce Client Toolkit
• Project Blue Spruce Co-Web Server

Here's a summary of what we know so far about the Blue Spruce platform:

- Uses the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine (in the demo we saw, Safari was the browser being used)
- Uses the following Open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, (All Ajax), XMPP, H.264
- Server runs on Linux, MacOS X
- Utilized OpenAjax Metadata Specification, so it can utilize any widgets
- It's being ported to IE 6+ and Firefox

NOT a Web Browser, But is a Platform

To be clear, IBM is not developing another browser. The client part of this project is based on a set of browser-based open standards technologies. They will in time (2010 timeframe) be integrated into existing browsers such as Safari, Firefox and IE.

The grand plan for IBM, we think, is that it wants the browser to become the platform for applications - thus putting pressure on companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which still rely heavily on desktop applications (albeit these days connected to the web).

It's also worth noting that this isn't (yet) an open source project. Rod Smith described it to us as a "community-sourced" project, meaning that it's built on open standards and so others in the developer community can contribute. Smith said it "may" become an open source project in future, but it's too early to say.

Why is IBM Heading to the Browser?

We asked IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, Rod Smith, why IBM is moving to browser-based applications. He replied that customers have been consistently telling them for 1-1.5 years now that they don't want to do installs anymore. Their customers want the rich experience that desktop apps have traditionally provided, but they want to have it in the browser. Collaboration and sharing data is also a trend that IBM is tapping into with Blue Spruce.

Proof of Concept Applications

At this time, Blue Spruce is in a closed beta period. IBM is creating applications for a number of customers, including Reuters and hospitals in Boston and New Zealand. They're focusing on 3 main areas right now: finance, health and "heavy industry" (defined as utilities, rail, steel, etc). As the project matures, we can expect to see IBM stepping up its application development efforts - services are after all a key part of IBM's business.

ReadWriteWeb was shown a number of 'proof of concept' demos. The functionality included Ajax-based mashups being used simultaneously by users in different locations (one in San Francisco, the other in Boston), audio and live streaming video (VGA currently, but HD is on the way) integrated with mashups, IM and feeds on the one browser page, and more rich functionality.

In other words, there were many different components (mashups, video, audio, etc.) all happening on the same browser page. Multiple users can interact with these components in real-time and see each others changes. As IBM explained it, all of the components are live and all participants can cause change that will be propagated. This will enable customers to have 'live meetings' and collaborate on applications - all within the browser.

It's unusual to see this level of functionality in a browser currently, so we think Blue Spruce could potentially be a big deal. It certainly will make big Internet companies like Microsoft, Adobe and probably even Google sit up and take notice of Big Blue.

Companies are being forced to cut costs and let people go. Some smart people aren't sitting around waiting to be downsized - instead they're jumping ship and hopping aboard another.

Whether you are let go or you leave on your own, there is an impact. Of course conventional wisdom says that everyone is replaceable. That may still be true, but the really important question is: at what cost? Is the cost of replacing someone today the same as it was 10 years ago? Just because technology is cheaper and more abundant it does not mean that it is cheap to replace people.

The fact is that we are increasingly becoming a real-time information processing society. Because of that, each one of us processes an increasingly large amount of unique information on a daily basis. Knowledge-based workers are very different from workers on a factory line, and the cost of replacing them is also very different. While companies save money in the short term, the longer term impact of losing a person is not so clear. In this post we look at the impact cutting jobs has on modern companies and try to figure out: are YOU replaceable?

Somewhere In Corporate America 20 Years Ago...

Story 1: Sorry Bob, you've been wonderful, but we will not be needing your services any longer. Here is Jack, fresh out of college, his salary is 25% of yours. Please train him in the next two weeks to do what you do.

Story 2: Hey boss, you've been wonderful, but I found a job that pays twice as much. Here is Jack, fresh out of college, his salary is 25% of mine. I will train him in the next two weeks to do what I do.

The aftermath of both stories is the same: Bob trains Jack in two weeks and then leaves. And even though Jack is very bright and had a 4.0 GPA in college, it is impossible to learn Bob's job in two weeks. It takes about two months for him to become productive. And this is quite a find. The long term cost is substantially lower and company benefits from the employee churn.

Why Today is Different

The problem is that today, two months ramp up time is not acceptable. It is just way too long. For a startup, two months is an eternity, but even for large companies two months is a long time. Today, people need to be replaced real-time - one is out and the next one is in full-speed, day one. This is difficult, particularly because of the incredible amount of information that we end up processing daily.

Increasingly, modern business is becoming a complex, distributed information processing system. The nodes of this system are employees, tirelessly passing bits around to each other, crunching and filtering with the goal to compute, to gain competitive advantage, and to help the business survive.

The problem is that unlike factories or boxes in the computing cloud, employees in the modern company are not identical. Each one knows a unique piece of the information puzzle that makes a company tick. Two weeks is not enough to do the transition and two months is way too long to waste training the new guy. This is why the old adage that everyone is replaceable may need some re-thinking.

The Days of Slackers are Over

Certainly, there are still plenty of examples where slackers are growing old getting paid to work their 9-5 jobs while getting little done. But safe havens for slackers are rapidly diminishing, because they are losing out to smarter, more agile, and faster competition.

A few years ago my wife, who is a clinical pharmacist, worked with a character that ultimately managed to get a pink slip in a huge company that had probably only ever fired one person - him. He started his day by searching the Internet for a rich relative. Yes, you read that correctly, the guy was searching for wealthy family members. At 11am, he walked around the office and asked what people thought would be offered in the cafeteria for lunch. Between 1pm and 2pm, he spent time reading the news, and then typically called his wife to discuss the dinner menu. This is funny, absurd, and sad at the same time. But think about it, can someone like that work in your company? No way! Companies can not afford to have people like this anymore.

The Emergence of the Digital Elite

In a way, the pressure of real-time information is polarizing - the hard-working people are becoming harder to replace, while slackers and perhaps less knowledgeable people are just not needed. We have seen this trend in software engineering for a while - a handful of smart people can accomplish much more than an army of mediocre workers. A skilled, quick professional stands out these days. The people who shine are the people who get the new world - a no-nonsense approach, courtesy, and most importantly, speed.

Recently, my insurance broker switched companies. He quickly contacted me, offered an attractive new package, and then drove 1.5 hours from his office to my home to sign the papers. His commission would not want warrant the trip, but he was smart to make the investment of his time because he won me as a client. On the other hand, the cost of losing a talented employee for his old company just increased - they also lost a client, and I am sure I was not the only one.

Although my insurance agent lives in the technical world, he is part of new breed of folks that I call the digital elite. He uses Facebook to keep in touch with his friends, he was savvy enough to look up my company on the web, and he knows all the cool financial websites. In other words, he is on top of what's going on. He knows all about the speed of information in our world. And this makes him a serious and important player, of the type that is really hard to replace.

Are Leaders and Visionaries Replaceable?

Clearly, after Bradley Horowitz moves to Google, Yahoo! survives. He will be replaced by someone else just as talented and as passionate and the ship will sail forward. But saying that he will be replaced is very different from computing the cost of his departure. Losing leaders and visionaries is very, very costly. The knowledge, the vision, and the game plan that was in his head is unique and can not be replicated.

Great companies are defined by the great people behind them. There are no great companies without visionary leaders. And if you agree that all knowledge workers are becoming increasingly more valuable, the leaders are then 10 times more valuable. Retention of key leaders and managers is paramount to the success of modern large companies. So I am sure that Bradley, who grew through the ranks at Yahoo! and was one of the faces of the company, will be greatly missed.

Conclusion

And yet, churn is such a huge part of nature! Our world is based on transition and change. Changing jobs is an integral part of your career path. When people move around, society benefits from knowledge sharing and new alliances that lead to great new ideas. Remixing is good for both individuals and companies, so there is no way that churn will ever stop.

But still, it is now becoming more costly for the companies. Because of the increasing amount of information processing done by individuals and the uniqueness of each, getting replacements up to speed is more costly. Retaining and motivating the digital elite should be recognized as a high priority for any company.

So, tell us how you feel about all of this? Do you feel insecure in your current position? Are you looking for a new job? What is your company doing to motivate and retain key people?

Top image credit: New York Times