Currently the Weekly Wrap-Up is on a break - as I enjoy the New Zealand summer weather, mow the lawns, quaff coronas, spend quality time, do maintenance on R/WW's design, strategize for 2006 and watch the cricket. So this is a good opportunity to look back at the highlights of the Weekly Wrap-Up in 2005. I'm not sure what form it will take in '06, but it served me well in '05.

Here's a list of one highlight chosen from each Weekly Wrap-Up throughout the year. In a way it tells the story of the whole Web 2.0 meme, as it rolled out and eventually drove some of us to distraction. Time Magazine better hurry up and put Web 2.0 on their cover...

2-8 January 2005: Six Apart acquires LiveJournal
9-15 January: Feedburner releases statistics for RSS Aggregator market share
16-22 January: Lawyer Martin Schwimmer opened up a can of worms with his request (granted) to have his RSS feed removed from Bloglines.
30 Jan-6 Feb: a sensationalistic headlines special. Top story: Bloglines Shocker! Butler Buys Master of the Blog Universe!
7-13 Feb: 43Things gets both positive and negative publicity from Salon.com in the space of 24 hours. 
14-20 Feb: NY Times Buys About.com.
21-27 Feb: an Oscars special. Best New Web App Approach That Isn't Really New = AJAX!
28 Feb - 6 Mar: "If Web 2.0 was a school classroom, then Yahoo would be the teacher's pet right now."
7-13 Mar: Microsoft's Start.com
21-27 Mar: "So... what was new at Yahoo this week?"
28 Mar - 3 Apr: del.icio.us gets funding
4-10 Apr: "Advertising within an RSS feed is a sensitive issue and it's a case of softly softly for publishers, but I do think we're turning a corner."
11-17 Apr: Rupert Murdoch's Sermon From The Mount
18-24 Apr: Mobile Web 2.Woe
25 Apr - 1 May: "This week Google released two major updates to their online advertising services, which account for 97% of Google's revenue."
2-8 May: Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. launching a podcasting show, to be hosted by ex-MTV star Adam Curry. 
9-15 May: Greasemonkey gives power to power users
16-22 May: Google factory Tour: "New? Google Personalized Homepage, Google Earth (a satellite mapping service), AdSense for Feeds, language translations."
23-29 May: Techie Post of the Week: chmod 777 web
30 May - 5 June: RSS Ripoff Merchants
6-12 June: Introducing... New apps on the block
13-19 June: International Special
20-26 June: "The biggest story of the week, probably even the year, was Microsoft's bearhug embrace of RSS."
27 June - 3 July: Thoughts on Yahoo! My Web 2.0
4-10 July: London bombings
11-17 July: RSS Growing Up So Fast
18-24 July: News Corp bought MySpace - implications
25-31 July: Ajax Backlash
1-7 August: Hype 2.0
8-14 August: "A lot of interest this week in how the label 'RSS' is being usurped by 'feeds' or 'Web feeds'."
15-21 August: Flock and Wordpress.com released.
22-28 August: Google releases Google Talk.
29 Aug - 4 Sep: Social tools help in Katrina Hurricane
5-11 Sep: "News this week that Microsoft is releasing a set of developer APIs for four MSN properties: MSN Virtual Earth, MSN Messenger, Start.com and MSN Search."
12-18 Sep: eBay confirmed its acquisition of Skype for between $2.6 - 4.1 billion.
19-25 Sep: "This week saw a big increase in blog posts about Web 2.0, probably because of the upcoming Web 2.0 conference."
26 Sep - 2 Oct: "A lot of online trees were felled this week to write about what Web 2.0 means."
3-9 October: Web 2.0 Conference Special
10-16 Oct: Susan Mernit quote: "The Valley is humming with activity and with what some say is acquisition fever, but is often the happy sounds of geeks being creative."
17-23 Oct: "This was the week when the Web 2.0 Naysayers reached a crescendo of cynicism and even bile."
24-30 Oct: Big 3 news...
31 Oct - 6 Nov: Microsoft Live wrap-up
7 - 13 Nov: "There's something about the Web 2.0 meme that drives people into either passionate, sometimes bubble-icious behavior - or enrages them into cyncial, often foul-mouthed rants. There's not much middle ground."
14-20 Nov: Google Base - the good, the bad and the ugly
26 Nov - 2 Dec: Yahoo integrates RSS into Yahoo! Mail and their alerts service.
3 - 9 Dec: Open up your media, the Lightnet revolution is here.
10 - 16 Dec: Yahoo buys del.icio.us

1. Yahoo buys del.icio.us. Yahoo! continues its buying spree of cool Web app companies, after also buying Flickr and konfabulator this year. Bubblegeneration had a nice summary: "Yahoo, I think, is rolling up social plays so it can basically do what I've outlined as the dominant Media 2.0 strategy: vertically integrate across the 2.0 value chain, with a focus on the edges."

2. Amazon announced the Alexa Web Search Platform, which provides public access to Alexa data along with computing and storage resources. I wrote about it here. Most bloggers were bullish about the news, but it remains to be seen what third party services are developed on top of Alexa's platform.

3. FeedBurner makes RSS interactive, with FeedFlare. A big step towards delivering decent functionality and interactivity to RSS feeds. It's significant because RSS is a far more important content 'container' these days than HTML.

4. Structured blogging arrives, with two new plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type. Phil Pearson rounded up all the action. Josh Porter also had an interesting take, which prompted Bob Wyman of PubSub to comment: "When Structured Blogging becomes the norm then we’ll have 'the semantic web.'".

5. Tagworld takes on MySpace - TechCrunch and Om Malik have the details. In a nutshell, Tagworld is focusing on music in an attempt to muscle in on MySpace's market share.

6. Global Voices Online Summit. Dina Mehta provided excellent coverage on this truly global blogging event. Also see a follow-up post from Dina, in which she talks about how an Israeli and Palestinian blogger sorted out some issues while at the summit. Inspiring stuff.

7. Google releases a Music Search, giving users links to song lyrics, music artists "popular in the U.S." and CD titles on the main search results page. Here is an example of a Google music search on my favorite band, The Velvet Underground.

8. Ryan Stewart, who works for the Learning Lab group at The Wharton School, wrote about how the Web is changing education: "To me, Web 2.0 isn't just about tagging and blogging, it's about really using the web to its fullest potential and changing whatever industry you're in. For us, it's changing the way students experience learning in the classroom."

9. TechCrunch thinks Writely is kicking a**. According to Mike, Writely continues to lead the pack in online ajax word products.

10. Yahoo joined forces with the Seven Network, one of Australia's leading television and media companies. Couple of interesting comments were left on my blog about that deal. In yet more Yahoo news, they announced a partnership this week with Six Apart to provide Movable Type hosting.

That's a wrap for another week!

1. Lightnet: open up your media, the Lightnet revolution is here. Lucas Gonze is leading the charge of the lightnet brigade: "The strength of lightnet is that everybody who's not a media incumbent wants it, and that's more than enough creative energy to do the job."

2. Jeremy Wright: Web 2.0 Companies NEED To Scale... posted just before he reported his own company B5 Media was having "uptime issues". Which proves that Web 2.0 people do have a sense of irony after all. Also check out the comments thread in Om Malik's post on the subject of scalability, together with my post on ZDNet.

3. Adam Curry impeached (or something apparently as serious): Ben Barren had the best post I read on the Curry Wikipedia scandel. Admittedly I only read one post about it.

4. The Yahoo product blitz continues, with Messenger with Voice and Answers. See also Om Malik's excellent post Tripping the Yahoo Fantastic. Very poetic: "At the end of the day, as I waited for my cab, the crowds still bustled around me. Around somewhere in my tired brain, a though rattled, just like me, Yahoo was waiting. I just can’t say for what or for whom…."

5. Mike Arrington continues his journey to find the flickr of videos, by reviewing Grouper. Just as Daisy was Gatsby's elusive dream, the flickr of videos is Mike's. In 20 years time it'll be seen as a classic Web 2.0 story...

6. PCWorld.com - The 100 Best Products of 2005. If you manage to see past the pop-up adverts, you'll note that Firefox was number 1 and Gmail runner-up. Apple Tiger OS was third.

7. VentureBlog: Social Networks 3.0. Quote: "...entrepreneurs have come to realize that social networks are enablers of other compelling consumer experiences." Or put another way, the best way to run an SNS these days is to offer users utility. I recommend reading Jeff Clavier's wonderful post a month or so ago, about Facebook, for an illustration of this.

8. Bubblegeneration: Media 1.0 and Coordination Arbitrage. The economics in Umair's posts often goes over my head, but I loved this line: "My kid sister is young enough to think that MySpace is corporate and lame. How do you think her generation is going to express and define itself?"

9. RSS Fund Makes 1st Investment. Private equity fund RSS Investors made a $9-million investment round in Attensa, an RSS Reader for MS Outlook. Also read Randy Charles Morin's interview with Jim Moore, an RSS Investor partner: "Within the next 18 months more than 110 million desktops will be fully RSS-oriented, simply through the distribution of Microsoft Vista." 

10. Six Apart chief's 'nice' speech ends in name-calling. Folks, this is a 'story' that should've been a Register exclusive (and ignored by all sensible people). Sigh, I despair sometimes for the blogosphere... more fodder for Nicholas Carr.

That's a wrap for another week!

1. Yahoo integrates RSS into Yahoo! Mail and their alerts service. This was the biggest news of the week - see my coverage on ZDNet and analysis on Read/WriteWeb. Why was it important? Mainly because Yahoo has 227 million unique users for Yahoo Mail, according to Scott Gatz. It's a huge, mostly untapped, market for RSS and will introduce millions more people to the benefits of syndication.

2. Evan Williams' Ten Rules for Web Startups is a must read post for aspiring entrepreneurs. Worth sticking up on your wall. See also Ben Barren's 10 Rules for a Hollywood Startup ("5. Dont have any idea what an API is or what it is like not to be a VIP.")

3. The Great Eyeballs Debate started up again this week, courtesy of an Om Malik article in Business2. By Om's numbers, BoingBoing is worth a cool $34M. But Jason Calacanis did a Good Will Hunting number on Om, saying it's more like $500k-$3M. How do you like them apples?

4. Mashups are a hot topic right now. Check out my Top Mashups post, inspired by the ProgrammableWeb popular mashups page. Speaking of mashups, Ning King Jon Aquino has created yet another interesting app - Google and Yahoo Maps Side By Side.

5. Skype released the next version of its product (yes, 2.0), which includes video calling functionality. Supr.c.ilio.us had blanket coverage.

6. Mobile Opportunity: why Web 2.0 doesn't cut it for mobile devices. Good post that explains how mobile web applications need a different architecture than PC web apps, because of connectivity issues with mobile. Quote: "they [mobiles] need both a local client and a local cache of the client data, so the app can be fully functional even when the user is out of coverage." 

7. Jeremy Zawodny posted the results of his 30 Day Gmail and Yahoo! Mail Challenge. Showing that he's certainly not biased, Gmail won (Jeremy works at Yahoo).

8. Nick Denton's Startup kit is worthy of mention, if only because bizarrely he included two humans in the kit - VC Fred Wilson and Nick's attorney.

9. Web browsers were big this week. Firefox 1.5 was released and I wrote two posts about the browser market. On the PC Microsoft is set to continue its dominance with IE7's release next year, despite Firefox's rise. However in the growing mobile market it could be the likes of Opera or Mozilla that takes the early lead.

10. Flickr and Webshots - A classic web2.0 case. This post charted how Web 2.0 wunderkind Flickr has over the course of 2005 gained ground on, and now overtaken, Web 1.0 photo-sharing site Webshots. Thomas Hawk also did an analysis. Excellent work all round.

That's a wrap for another week!

Sponsor Opportunity

The Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-Up has had 3 excellent sponsors over the past 30 weeks and now I'm looking for the next great sponsor. If you'd like to associate your brand with premium Web 2.0 content, known and loved by millions thousands all over the world, click here to send me an email and let's talk.

Explaining Web 2.0 to Normal People

Two excellent posts this week on the topic of presenting Web 2.0 to 'normal' people (i.e. non-geeks). I myself did this a couple of weeks ago, when I did a presentation about Web 2.0 to a group of New Zealand Government managers. My approach was to present Web 2.0 in ways that might be familiar to them. So I used MyYahoo as a prime example (RSS, podcasts, user-generated content, etc), and also Flickr, Creative Commons, Wikipedia, BBC Backstage, and finally del.icio.us (at which point I finally cracked and admitted del.icio.us is "a bit geeky"). I also mentioned other staples like Google, eBay and Amazon.

Anyway, Matt McAlister had a great post this week entitled How to present Web 2.0 ideas that resonate with non-technical people. Apart from being the first person this year to invoke the Information Superhighway (a dubious honour?), Matt also noted that mashups is a concept that people can relate to.

My book co-author Joshua Porter also gave a talk during the week, entitled Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us. He's got a podcast of it available (60MB!). Josh focused on the concept of 'hacking' in his speech, noting: "I made the argument that the history of the Web was all about hacking, and that hacking is really the only way to innovate."

Google Base - the good, the bad and the ugly

Google Base, a kind of classifieds service for anything and everything, was officially released this week and it got a mixed reception. Mike Arrington had the best headline of the week with this: Google Base Launched. Yuck. Others were also not impressed with the notion of a centralized database, including Bubblegum Generation and Yahooligan Alex Moskalyuk (who called Google Base "the Flickr of everything"). 

However in the end I was swayed by the long-term visions of Michael Parekh and Bill Burnham, who think Google is building a human directory layer on top of their machine-generated search results. As I concluded in my ZDNet blog:

Google Base may not be pretty to look at and it may be a centralized database, but the potential is there to turn it into a hugely valuable directory of structured content. Plus if they add APIs and start aggregating outside RSS feeds, then they could easily extend Google Base and remove the issues around it being a 'walled garden'.

Yahoo's Shoposhere and Amazon tags

Yahoo! released a shopping search and recommendations service early this week, called Shoposhere, and TechCrunch had the scoop:

"Yahoo is making a major push into search personalization and recommendations - the overall project is called “Shoposphere” and the major feature being released is called “Pick Lists“. Their goal is to move ecommerce towards what they call “me commerce”. Any registered Yahoo user can create a Pick List."

It has all the things you'd expect from a 2.0 service: RSS feeds, reviews, ratings, personalized lists, user profiles, sharing, comments, community. Tick all the boxes, Yahoo! is putting out some fine products these days.

Also released this week was Amazon's tagging, in which users will be able to apply tags to any item on the Amazon website. A user's tags will be collected under their profile. It took longer than expected for Amazon to introduce tagging, but then I can't think of many commercial websites as big as Amazon that do tagging - if you know of any, please leave a comment.

2.0 Post of the Week

Alex Barnett has been pumping out some excellent posts over the past couple of months and this one in particular caught my eye: Hypertext and the next 15 years. Apart from introducing the witty phrase "loser-generated content" to our growing Web 2.0 lexicon, Alex makes 10 bold predictions for 2020. Here's my favourite prediction:

"Evolutionary algorithms powering the majority of successful businesses, e.g the #1 attention service and market-making software will be powered by algorithms that no-one created and that no-one can understand. Algorithms become the new Internet rockstars"

Hmmm, that may come true sooner than we think according to the UN's telecommunications agency :-0

That's a wrap for another week!

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Web 2.0 - Rockin' All Over The World

This week we've seen evidence that Web 2.0 is taking over the world reaching out to other parts of the world. China Web2.0 Review is a new english language blog focused on Web 2.0 developments in China, a key market in the near and long-term future. Australians are hosting Long Tail parties, Spain recently hosted its own Web 2.0 conference, as did Britain, and the TechCrunch format is being exported to Ireland (sounds like a franchise opportunity for Mr Arrington!). Web 2.0 is happening all over the world. Stay tuned for more announcements about this on Read/WriteWeb in the near future.

Mainstream Media Meltdown

Chris Anderson from The Long Tail blog updated us on some mainstream media stats this week. They showed that sales for box office, newspaper, music (except for digital downloads), radio and books were all falling by 2-7%. There were "mixed" results for DVDs, TV, magazines and video games. The only media doing consistently well is online advertising - banners are up 10% this year and Google revenues are up 96%.

The stats were sourced from all over the place and the comments to Chris' post include some valid criticism about the accuracy of the data - e.g. the book stats Chris used were from 2004 not 2005. However, having done a research report earlier in the year on this topic, I can verify that such data is extremely difficult to come by! If nothing else, it proves that online advertising - and by extension online media - is enjoying a bumper year.

Microsoft "Leaked" Docs

This week Microsoft continued its well-publicized push into the Web 2.0 world, with the release of "leaked" documents by Bill Gates and CTO Ray Ozzie. The leak was probably intentional, but even so they contained some useful tips about where Microsoft is at in terms of Web 2.0. IDG ran an article late this week across its publications (Computerworld, CIO, etc) under the heading Microsoft lacks Web 2.0 savvy, or variations on that. The article quoted me extensively, but I think I should point out that I don't think Microsoft lacks savvy. What they lack is products that live up to the Live announcements and accompanying memos. But I assume those are coming in 2006...

Web 2.0 Poster Children Rebel

Web 2.0 is certainly a love it or hate it affair. People like me love it because it represents an exciting new generation of the Internet and media, people like The Register and Go Flock Yourself hate it (for the same reason?). There's something about the Web 2.0 meme that drives people into either passionate, sometimes bubble-icious behavior - or enrages them into cyncial, often foul-mouthed rants. There's not much middle ground.

Anyway, my point here is that some of the Web 2.0 "poster children" have decided enough is enough and they don't want to be labelled Web 2.0 anymore. The Flock team has banned the term 'Web 2.0' from its office and del.icio.us creator Joshua Schachter is also rebelling against being "the Web 2.0 poster child". 

I only have this to say in response: The Illuminati is not impressed. (hat-tip FactoryJoe for the image!)

2.0 Post of the Week

Never let it be said that I'm not down with 'the kids'. OK, so I missed seeing this post in early October when it first came out. But it's worth highlighting now anyway, because it's a witty and well written account of how a young guy called samy conquered myspace.com with some clever javascript code. Here's an extract:

"If I can become their friend...if I can become their hero...then why can't their friends become my friend...my hero. I can propagate the program to their profile, can't I. If someone views my profile and gets this program added to their profile, that means anyone who views THEIR profile also adds me as a friend and hero, and then anyone who hits THOSE people's profiles add me as a friend and hero... So if 5 people viewed my profile, that's 5 new friends. If 5 people viewed each of their profiles, that's 25 more new friends. And after that, well, that's when things get difficult. The math, I mean.

Some people would call this a worm. I call it popularity. Regardless, I don't care about popularity, but it can't hurt, right?" 

That's a wrap for another week!

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Microsoft Live wrap-up

The big news of the week was Microsoft's announcement of Windows Live and Office Live. My post entitled Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0 summarized all the news and my thoughts. Here are some extras and links, to wrap everything up for the week:

• On ZDNet, I compared the 'personalized start pages' of Microsoft, Google, Netvibes - and concluded that Netvibes can teach the other two a few lessons. Microsoft's live.com site in particular needs a lot of work.
• Mini-Microsoft was uncharacteristically generous in his/her praise: "To me, we're filling the Alpha Geek void for Microsoft technology. We're providing an alpha-geek portal and set of services for them to build new, interesting results on-top of our services and gadgets and all that other cool stuff."
• Markoff at NY Times echoed my own views: "... [Live is] an important step in extending Microsoft's reach beyond the desktop PC to smart phones and other Internet-connected devices."
• Om Malik mapped Microsoft's competition and his post comparing MS to Macys is also worth a read.
• A lot of designer folks rather unkindly compared Bill Gates presentation style to Steve Jobs (no contest, of course - and that's the way it should be).
• Finally a big thanks to Mike Arrington and Dan Farber for the excellent real-time notes at Microsoft's announcement, also Niall Kennedy for his outstanding annotated photos of the event (I borrowed some pics from Mike too).

Flash Maps and the Mechanical Turk

No that's not the sequel to the Jude Law movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It refers to the two other talking points of the week - Yahoo's new Flash-powered Maps product and Amazon's Mechanical Turk. TechCrunch had the scoop on Yahoo Maps and also covered the Turk. Mike's been on top of his blogging game these past couple of weeks! 

Mechanical Turk is an Amazon.com web service that enables users to "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers [and] get paid for it." It took me by surprise because a) it was the first new thing we'd seen out of Amazon for some time; and b) what an innovative thing it is too!

Amazon was one of the first 'Web 2.0' big companies to emerge, in the mid-90's - if not the first. They were ahead of the curve in rolling out large-scale user-generated content systems, affiliate services, and APIs. So the Mechanical Turk may well represent the next generation of Web as Platform systems. We won't know for sure until we see if people actually use it, but I'm pleased to see that Amazon still has the developer edge to try new things.

Web 2.0 meet-ups all over the world

Gerald Bauer emailed me to advise of a free monthly Web 2.0 event series over in Canada (Vancouver, BC) organized by the Vancouver Web 2.0 Forum. Here are the details.

Over in the Valley, there's an upcoming BrainJams event called Making Web 2.0 Relevant. It's on 3 December at SRI in Menlo Park and the theme is translating human needs into web 2.0. These are the folks who brought you Web 2.1 in SF and they're sponsored by TechCrunch and Zazzle amongst others. I hope there'll be some serious podcasting going on, so I can listen in!

Closer to home, my cousins in Australia are getting into the Web 2.0 BBQ spirit. Ben Barren advises of a Melbourne BBQ on 11 November, as part of the Long Tail Camp. Paul Montgomery discusses the beer etiquette involved in this event:

"The most popular beer at the event will be a key metric for the eventual fate of Web 2.0 in Australia. VB: not good, a sign of it being dull and low key. Stella: not the best either, indicates too many dilettantes. Heineken: cripes mate, stick to Aussie beers ya galah. Foster's: stop pandering to American stereotypes of Australia, no one drinks Foster's here. Carlton Draught, Cooper's Pale Ale or Cascade Premium: now you're talking, champ... dot com 2.0 millions await!"

Strewth mate, I drink Stella Artois! I guess that makes me a dilettante. Oh well, put another shrimp on the barbie and save a place for me at a BBQ soon. Melbourne is where Web 2.0 is at in Australia, plus I've been there before and it's a great city. So I hope to visit again in the near future. 

2.0 Blog of the Week

I'm going to do something a bit different this week. Usually I do a Post of the Week, but how about a Blog of the Week? This week I want to highlight Supr.c.ilio.us: The Blog. In a phrase, these guys are Snark 2.0. They keep us Web 2.0 pundits honest and make sure we don't take ourselves too seriously. 

I first noticed Supr.c.ilio.us a few weeks ago in one of my vanity feeds, when they made some snarky remarks about me. So of course I had to subscribe. And I've since become addicted to their fine brand of snark. Here's one of their recent posts, a definition:

"user created content
Abbreviation. Refers to users that do not receive health benefits, steady paycheck or attend the company’s x-mas party, yet are able to use a networked computer. Tracing back to the days of AOL, the term has been made derogatory (wikipedia? that’s user created content!), only to be revived recently (we scale by aggregating user created content globally and presenting it locally). Often found on CL, social networks, and splogs." 

Also check out their meta tagging site, Supr.c.ilio.us. Keep up the great work guys.

That's a wrap for another week!

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Microsoft's Web 2.0 Strategy

There's big news coming this week from Microsoft, on the consumer as well as business side. It sounds like Microsoft is really ramping up its Web 2.0 strategy. 

Meanwhile, this week I wrote a few posts about Microsoft's corporate "hosted services" moves. According to InformationWeek, Microsoft plans to offer hosted implementations of SharePoint, CRM and ERP applications. From that article I jumped on a choice quote from an unnamed Microsoft source, who was asked which other products and services Microsoft would host: "Everything. Hosted Office. Everything hosted." From that I extrapolated that a Web-based Office product may be in the works. More details here, here and here. I also got quoted by InfoWorld.

Google Base

Google's new database product was much discussed this week. What is it? Well the official Google Blog was typically vague:

"We are testing a new way for content owners to submit their content to Google, which we hope will complement existing methods such as our web crawl and Google Sitemaps."

In English then, Google Base is a way for people to upload anything from classifieds to reviews. It's being touted by many pundits as being a potential eBay killer and some vertical search engines are feeling nervous ("all your verticals are belong to us?").

But it may turn out they have nothing to fear. As TechCrunch put it:

"My prediction: when the dust settles, this will either be largely ignored or universally hated. Centralized content is boringÖso much is going on at the edge of the web, why would anyone try to put it all back in the center?"

Yahoo! keeps rollin' em out

Not to be outdone, Yahoo! was as busy as ever releasing new products this week. Firstly they released Travel Trip Planner, which will enable people to "enter a single search and get a fully formed trip, courtesy of a fellow traveler, back". The Planner will have access to content from thousands of Yahoo! Travel users - reviews and ratings of hotels, restaurants and things to do. It sounds very handy for holiday planners, and will become even more so when Yahoo! integrates booking options and perhaps promotional specials.

The business2blog found this very relevant Web 2.0 conference quote from Y! CEO Terry Semel, on the topic of travel:

"In my opinion, travel should be mostly user-generated content. I don’t need some [professional] to tell me where to go in Italy. I want someone to tell me who took their family to Italy and to share the photos and the video."

Yahoo! also released some Social media action buttons and video search features this week. I don't think the buttons are aimed at the tech community, but they'll probably be popular amongst the millions of mainstream users Yahoo! caters to.

Web 2.0 Humour

There's been a lot of excellent Web 2.0 humour this past week. Paul Montgomery has a wicked take-off of an AC/DC song, called Two Point Two Oh Ain't Web Pollution. Here is the chorus:

Two point oh ain't Web pollution
Two point oh ain't gonna die
Two point oh ain't Web pollution
Two point oh it will be flipped

And check out the picture! That's Gabe Rivera, Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Mike Arrington (who posted about it here). All that's missing is Richard "Ozzy Osbourne" MacManus - rumour has it I wear weird robes and bite the heads off bats!

Other humour 2.0 of note: Andrew Wooldridge's Create your own Web 2.0 Company and The Silent Penguin's TagTagger - the Web 2.0 tagging site that lets you tag tags. And if you're really serious about your humour, you should shell out for a Bubble 2.0 tee-shirt (I expect at least a 20% commission for that advertisement, Charlie).

2.0 Post of the Week

Russell Beattie produced what is in my opinion the best anti-Web 2.0 post yet to emerge. Eat yer heart out Nicholas Carr and TheRegister. For those "professional" writers out there wondering what the secret is, here it is: Russ nails all that's not quite right about Web 2.0, but he stays optimistic and a believer in what is good about Web 2.0 (and there's a lot of that). I call it passion - it's what so great about blogs.

Anyway, here's Russ:

"It just seems that no one is trying to change the world any more. No one is aiming to create “insanely great” products or do the impossible. Why not? Why are so many people grasping at the low-hanging fruit, when there’s so much more goodness for everyone if they just stretched a little higher?

That’s just on the product functionality side - I haven’t seen anything interesting on the business side either. No one seems to be coming up with the next interesting new business model. I’m not looking for anything wacky, but there’s got to be better ways for your site to make money than waiting for Google to send you an AdSense check every month." 

That's a wrap for another week!

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Anti-Web 2.0

This was the week when the Web 2.0 Naysayers reached a crescendo of cynicism and even bile. Some of the criticism about Web 2.0 is right on the mark, don't get me wrong. For example there are a lot of 'features as companies' going around. And I'm all for people pointing out the flaws in Web 2.0 business models and reminding us when marketing buzzwords get out of hand. But to dismiss the whole Web 2.0 era in one fell swoop, as some people are doing, is taking things too far.

I like how Alex Barnett put it, when he wrote that he's both a Web 2.0 enthusiast and "cynical of the dotcom Bubble mentality". In a similar vein, I'm currently trying to focus on the positive things about Web 2.0 by searching for disruptive start-ups and reporting on mainstream adoption of 2.0 technologies.

Here are some of the posts I wrote this week on these themes:

ZDNet: Disruptive Start-Ups: Some Contenders
ZDNet: The Great Disruptive Start-Ups Search, Part 1
ZDNet: Where are the disruptive start-ups in Web 2.0?
Web 2.0 Naysaying reaches an all-time high (or is it low)
Publishers sue Google - more evidence of 20th Century Media Delusion
There is no cult of the amateur, Mr Carr

Bubble 2.0 Meme Map

Just to prove I haven't lost my sense of humour about the anti-Web 2.0 hype, here's a great parody by the Bubble 2.0 blog:

Plus in the spirit of Web 2.0, you can create your own meme map here ;-)

Flock

The other big news of the week was the release of Flock, a new type of web browser that has many 2.0 goodies in it. Flock got mixed reviews in the blogosphere, as captured by tech.memeorandum's coverage.

One of my favourite quotes about Flock was this from the Mini-AOL blog: "Will AOL users ever use it? I doubt it. Will Netscape users use it? Maybe. however I think as a technology Flock will be a positive experience to alot of people."

I too think Flock will struggle to make an impression on mainstream users, however the technology itself will be influential for many in the Web community - which may end up being reflected in spin-off technologies and trends. There's nothing wrong with that, indeed it's a sign of a healthy and growing Web. I wish the Flocksters well though and I hope they prove me and others wrong by attracting a mainstream audience to their new browser.

The Web future of Libraries

In all this arguing over the value or otherwise of the Web 2.0 meme, I've almost lost track of what is really important - how Web 2.0 ideas are being implemented in The Real World. I came across a great post by Michael Casey of LibraryCrunch, who is investigating what the Library 2.0 Web site will look like. He pointed to Michael Stephens' round-up of responses to that question, which are well worth perusing. I liked this one from Sarah Houghton, from Marin County Public Library and the Librarian in Black blog:

"The next generation small public library website will be moving up to the same level the larger public library websites are at now: blogs, RSS feeds, dynamic reading/watching/listening lists, lots of online forms, with links to some user-friendly and computer-friendly lightweight virtual reference options (like instant messaging)."

I have to admit I'm a big library user, so if my local library gets the functionality Sarah outlined - I will be one happy geek!

Techie Post of the Week - Barren on Astronauts

My aussie mate on 2.0 matters Ben Barren has pumped out some outstanding blog posts over the past couple of weeks. He originally started out as a blogger by mostly copying and pasting what other bloggers said. But he has a unique and compelling blog voice, so I'm pleased he's writing original material much more these days. If you've never checked out Ben's blog, it'll take a while to adjust to it - but you won't find a more original voice on Web 2.0. And his blog comes with pictures too ;-) Anyway I particularly enjoyed Ben's response to the Architecture Astronauts issue:

"What annoys me with this astronautical argument is that google already have the NASA deal, so the opportunity is taken. Time to move on. Adam Curry is talking about bio-diesel and thats in the right direction if you ask me. But seriously, If I was working at a hedge fund, and I was playing Nasdaq (while not messing with the federal bank of high debt 3rd world countries) I'd want to make as much money in (insert any market segment buzzword eg Web 2.0) and have as much fun with the market going down, as the market going up. The market isnt intrinsically good or bad. So why is Web 2.0 good or bad. I mean yes, the term sucks, but you dont have to put it on your business card. Compromise, put it on a blog card."

That's a wrap for another week!

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Geeks being creative

I'm now back in my home of New Zealand, after spending two fantastic weeks in Silicon Valley. As I look back on my time there, and look forward to going back, I'm reminded of this post from Susan Mernit. She pointed out there's a lot of start-up activity going on right now in the Valley, but what I liked best was the non-cynical way she put it:

"The Valley is humming with activity and with what some say is acquisition fever, but is often the happy sounds of geeks being creative."

Now that's something a lot of us can identify with: geeks being creative. With that in mind, here are some of the start-ups I have my eye on:

* Flock
* edgeio
* Sphere
* Measure Map (not a start-up, but Adaptive Path's new product - which is kick-ass)
* Zazzle
* Zimbra
* zvents (companies whose names start with Z is obviously all the rage)

There are loads more I could mention - but give me a break, I have jetlag ;-) TechCrunch has profiles of all of the above.

Yahoo! RSS Research

During the Web 2.0 Conference Yahoo! released a research report on the takeup of RSS. The resulting white paper was entitled RSS - Crossing into the Mainstream, which is a good indication of both the findings of the research and what Yahoo! is attempting to achieve in their use of RSS. The main points in the research were:

* Only 12% of the Internet population has heard the term RSS
* Only 4% of the population knowingly uses RSS
* 27% of the internet population uses RSS but doesn’t know that it's called RSS.

The conclusion is that we need to evangelise the benefits of RSS rather than the technology itself. Or as Yahoo!'s head of RSS Scott Gatz wrote: "Focus your message on what your service does for consumers, not how it does it." Scott has a follow-up post that wraps up all of the reactions to the research.

Reading Lists

OPML is an XML format for outlines, developed by Dave Winer (you may remember him from such developments as RSS and weblogs.com). OPML is beginning to be used more as a compliment to RSS - for example as a way to import and export peoples RSS subscriptions from one RSS Reader to another. Recently a new use for OPML has been discussed which may make it more mainstream - Reading Lists. 

Dave Winer and Niall Kennedy of Technorati met to discuss the idea of Reading Lists. Dave has a more detailed explanation, but what it boils down to is this: a Reading List will enable you to subscribe to a group of RSS feeds in your RSS Aggregator of choice. Whenever the group is updated, the Reading List automatically updates too.

As Mike Arrington pointed out, this will be perfect for our Web 2.0 Workgroup - which is a group of premium Web 2.0 blogs. We're in the ongoing process of adding new members to the Workgroup, so wouldn't it be great to have a Reading List OPML feed that users could subscribe to. It has two main benefits for users: 1) they only need to subscribe to one 'feed' - the OPML file; 2) the Reading List automatically updates whenever the group is modified. For publishers, it makes it easy to promote groups of like-minded websites and it's very convenient to manage.

Making money with Mash-Ups 

This week I wrote up my notes from the Mash-Ups panel at the Web 2.0 Conference. I concluded that although the technologies underlying mash-ups are still being sorted out - for example many mash-ups still use old school scraping to collect data - the business models are full steam ahead. A couple of days ago we saw a graphic illustration of this, when craiglist told classifieds 'meta' search engine Oodle to stop scraping its content. That generated a lot of healthy debate, but as yet there's no sign of a compromise between craigslist and Oodle. 

Dare Obasanjo has an interesting post about the case, in which he suggests businesses that provide data and services need to "decide where it makes business sense to open up their website or service as a web platform". Essentially this boils down to companies deciding how open they want their data to be. It's one of the hardest issues to grapple with in Web 2.0. A valiant attempt to do so was this post by William Blaze a month and a half ago, in which he rightly asked: "just how open are these [Web 2.0] technologies really?"

Techie Post of the Week

This is the first time I've made a video my techie post of the week. Robert Cringley interviewed the father of RSS, Dave Winer. There's a text transcript too and here's a highlight from that, in which Dave explains why he developed his outliner program:

"And so it's a very long story from there to the point where they're actually - I had a commercial Outliner. But that is where I - that was the moment at which I flipped, and I said, "Okay, I'm not making a tool for programmers as much as I'm making a tool for people, for literate people - for people with ideas, for people with information that they want to organize." And it turned out to be a very good tool for doing exactly that."

The video is well worth your time watching, especially if you want to know one of the back stories to Web 2.0.

That's a wrap for another week!

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The past week has been an amazing one for me. My first trip to America and I've met so many people that I'd previously only known via the Web (blogs, email, etc). The Web 2.0 Conference was held in San Francisco from Wednesday 5th to Friday 7th October. It was a hive of energy and enthusiasm. I spent the entire 3 days soaking up all the information and atmosphere - and putting names to faces. I was exhausted but buzzing by the end of the week. 

In this special edition of the Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, I've decided to do a top 10 list of things that I remember most about the conference. Here goes...

10. The jam-packed rooms. The conference was sold out and as a result most of the workshop rooms - and every other place where people congregated - were full to the brim. At times it was uncomfortable, but it did prove how much interest there is in Web 2.0 from techies, VCs, business people and lots of others. 

9. Best and worst conversations or workshops. All of the workshops I attended were very worthwhile, but for me the highlight of the formal part of the conference was John Battelle's conversation with Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel. I really dug his vision for Yahoo! as a technology/media company that is paving the way for 21st century media and entertainment. By contrast the worst conversation in terms of content was Barry Diller, whose 20th century media mogul views were hard to take. Diller was entertaining though, I'll give him that. 

8. Google stealing the show on Friday. They did this with two things - Google Reader was announced and then Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance for a conversation with Battelle. Google Reader turned out to be a bit disappointing, but it was cunning PR to announce it at the conference on Friday after months of conjecture about when they'd release an RSS Reader. I enjoyed Brin's performance and I thought he effectively answered criticisms from competitors about Google's business model - he basically said Google is about being the #1 technology company and innovation will flow from the bottom-up. Whether or not that pans out is another matter, but the fact that Brin turned up to say it was noteworthy.

7. The acquisitions - Yahoo! bought upcoming.org, Newsgator bought Netnewswire, AOL bought weblogsinc, Verisign acquired weblogs.com. Of those, the weblogsinc deal generated the most buzz - perhaps because it gave a much-needed boost to the time-honoured Content is King theory.

6. The business models - or lack thereof. The conversation in the halls was about the over-reliance on acquisitions and advertising, in particular, from the many start-ups that have Web 2.0 products or services on the market. This is understandably making a lot of people nervous, although the general consensus seems to be to go with the flow and enjoy the ride.

5. Big Internet companies taking digs at each other in the conversations. Google was the natural target at this year's conference. Terry Semel from Yahoo! in particular took some well-aimed swipes at Google. Microsoft wasn't mentioned that much, except for MSN's Dare Obasanjo asking at least 1 question in every session he was present at (and good questions too). Amazon was hardly mentioned at all. Of the bigco's, I think Yahoo! came out the best from this conference. But Google and eBay did OK too.

4. Lots of small start-ups announcing cool new social software apps - zimbra, zvents, Orb, Flock, etc. TechCrunch coverage here and here. The workshop where they announced 12 of them was probably one I should've attended, in retrospect, but the mash-ups workshop was on at the same time and it was pretty good too.

3. Conference keywords (i.e. terms heard repeatedly): user-generated content, engagement, 2.0, 2.1, 1.0, platforms, mash-ups.

2. Bubble talk. There was a lot of chatter about whether we're in a bubble. Much of it is excitement at the present opportunities, mixed with a little caution and cynicism based on lessons from the dotcom era. Some would say there's too much Web 2.0 hype currently, but I think it's an exciting time to be doing things. Let's not get too cynical - or preachy about what Web 2.0 is or isn't. There are a lot of opportunities out there (I'll refrain from singing the Pet Shop Boys song).

1. The thrill of being among my peers and in the middle of all this Web 2.0 activity. I've spent the past 3 years exploring the Two-Way Web and then Web 2.0 on Read/WriteWeb - documenting the transition to the Web as platform era. The interest in Web 2.0 over the past year has almost directly matched the upsurge of interest in my blog, which is very gratifying. I'm currently busy working out how I can make a difference in Web 2.0 over the next year, as are many other people I'm sure.

That's a wrap for another week! My next Weekly Wrap-up will be written back in New Zealand, but I have a feeling I'll be back in Silicon Valley before too long ;-) I love this place.

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Defining Web 2.0

A lot of online trees were felled this week to write about what Web 2.0 means. Tim O'Reilly's definition is a very comprehensive one and is more satisfying than his valiant attempt at a compact definition. Barb Dybwad wrote an impressive social software-based definition, which is a good companion piece to Danah Boyd's two posts so far. Dion Hinchcliffe and Ken Yarmosh are doing sterling work rounding up the wide variety of Web 2.0 definitions going on. TechCrunch as always is right on top of the latest Web 2.0 developments. Then you have Josh Porter and yours truly doing our analysis thing, as well as smart people like Cristian Vidmar and Alex Barnett. There's a lot of great Web 2.0 explanations out there...OK there are a lot of posts questioning the Web 2.0 meme too. I don't mind that at all, as long as they're constructive posts like Jay Fienberg's.

Web-based Office

My post entitled The Web-based Office will have its day on ZDNet got a lot of attention this week, thanks to a Slashdotting. In the post I listed down a group of the latest Web-based Office apps (most of them AJAX-based) and summarized:

"The time for the web-based office will come, mark my words. When broadband is ubiquitous, web functionality is richer, issues of security and reliability have been put to rest, and most importantly of all - when Corporates are ready to make the jump. It may be 5-10 years down the track, it may be longer."

I must stress that I don't see web-based apps eating Microsoft's lunch anytime soon - 5-10 years is a minimum. Also as Phil Wainewright pointed out, web-based apps are most suited to be "collaborative, virtual workspaces" rather than personal productivity apps like Microsoft Office. That's a good point, although I still think web-based apps will in the long-run usurp PC-based apps. But then I'm one of those people who thinks everything will be handled in "the cloud" in future - even identity. It's not a particularly mainstream view, I admit that.

Yahoo! Media

Also in ZDNet this week I wrote about Yahoo's media plans and in particular the work they're doing to converge the Web and television. There are four pillars to their strategy: Search, Community (content contributed by "everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers"), Professionally created content, and Personalization technology. 

I think there's a lot of potential for interactivity and creativity to surface from outside traditional quarters (Hollywood in particular) with Yahoo's Web television. Already we're seeing users take control of their television experience with TiVo and Media Center. It sounds like Yahoo! has plans to take that up another level, with even more Web added to the TV (re)mix.

Google WiFi

Google's plans to cover San Francisco with free wireless high-speed Internet access was big news in the blogosphere this week. The AP thinks this will create "a springboard for the online search engine leader to leap into the telecommunications industry" and will be "a testing ground for a national WiFi service." That view was denied by the Google spokesman in the AP article. Google does admit though that San Francisco will be a test-ground for "new location-based applications and services". Note that there are also potential privacy issues. 

Om Malik thinks this could have major implications: "The Google Talk implications on a free network are quite far reaching, if you ask me, but then that’s just me." 

Ben Barren has an interesting take on this: "Is search and wifi connected to one another at google at the 'operational strategy level' ? I dont think so. Could they be connected ? Well g-duh, yes."

Techie Post of the Week: Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0

Well it goes without saying, but I think the What is Web 2.0 essay by Tim O'Reilly is significant. It's impossible to summarize, so I recommend you take some time and read it through. If there was one extract I had to highlight, it'd be this [talking about "Software Above the Level of a Single Device"]:

"Of course, any web application can be seen as software above the level of a single device. After all, even the simplest web application involves at least two computers: the one hosting the web server and the one hosting the browser. And as we've discussed, the development of the web as platform extends this idea to synthetic applications composed of services provided by multiple computers.

But as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the "2.0-ness" is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for the new platform."

That's a wrap for another week!

The Wrap-up is proudly sponsored by:

Microsoft vs Google

Over the last week the number of stories about Microsoft vs Google has reached a crescendo. The best one was a story by CNET entitled Microsoft's nightmare inches closer to reality - the nightmare incarnate being Google. The article had some great historical analysis along with a good poking around at MSN's current strategy. 

This week also produced a slew of stories about Google's Wifi and TV initiatives. Plus Microsoft announced a re-organization, of which the most significant 2.0 aspects were:

1) the integration of MSN into its platform product development group, where Windows is developed.

2) Bill Gates' new phrase "server equals service" and it's inherent meaning - the Web is now on an equal footing with Windows, at least publicly.

The problem/challenge for Microsoft is that their software (Windows) products are much stronger than their Web products. Google's strength is of course their Web products. I'll be writing more about this in the coming week.

Web 2.0 coverage galore

This week saw a big increase in blog posts about Web 2.0, probably because of the upcoming Web 2.0 conference. Here are some of the highlights (I admit I haven't had time to read them all yet):

- BusinessWeek did a special called It's A Whole New Web. 
- Dion Hinchcliffe wrote a well-linked to post at SOA Web Services Journal entitled The Web 2.0 is Here. 
- Tim O'Reilly published a meme map that was created during FOO Camp 2005. 
- MAKE magazine has an audio post entitled Distributing the Future - Data for Web 2.0.
- Stephen E. Arnold's eBook was released: The Google Legacy, How Google's Internet Search is Transforming Application Software (costs US$180, but damn I want to read it!)

There are also a ton of new Web 2.0 blogs, most of which provide a respectful link to the Father of Web 2.0 (Blogs) :-)

Web 2.0 Conference

I'm travelling from New Zealand to Silicon Valley at the end of this week, to attend the Web 2.0 Conference next week and network with Web folk. The TechCrunch crew is very kindly hosting me at their Atherton ranch-house, so I look forward to attending loads of BBQs! Seriously, the TechCrunch house seems to be a hub for Web 2.0 people currently and I'm honoured to be staying there.

I'm really excited about the trip and looking at the Web 2.0 Conference lineup, it's going to be a huge event. Here is the overview:

""Revving the Web" is the theme for the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference, reflecting the conviction that the web is being transformed into a new application and business platform. Web 2.0 will explore four key topics (computing and operating systems, media and entertainment, communications and mobile, and 'fun and inspiration') through short individual presentations, high-level interviews and lively panel discussions - all with ample time for audience participation and Q&A."

Needless to say, I'll be providing extensive coverage of the conference at Read/WriteWeb and my ZDNet blog Web 2.0 Explorer.

The Real World: Yoga blogging

Susan Mernit tells me the 10th annual Yoga Journal conference, a yoga conference in the rockies, will be live-blogged:

"The basic plan is to use multimedia to give the 10th annual Yoga Journal conference in EstesPark, Colorado, the kind of rich multimedia treatment a top-flight techconference receives. This is especially exciting because this conference honors B.K.S.Iyengar, 86 year old yogi and father of yoga in the West, who is coming to this conference from India to teach (and to be interviewed by Annette Beining). We'll have photo galleries (on flickr), podcasting, a range of bloggers, interviews with famous yoga teachers like Rodney Yee and Sean Corme, as well as exclusive footage of Mr.Iyengar and great info on the conference and related issues of wellness, balance, sprituality."

Excellent use of blogs and 2.0 technologies like Flickr! Not to mention very healthy (which is far more important).

Techie post of the week

I recently discovered a well-written and highly informative blog by a Microsoft employee, called Mini-Microsoft. This week the anonymous blogger wrote about the Microsoft Company Meeting 2005. I browsed the whole blog earlier this week and there's a lot of funny stuff - but also very insightful. One post discussed what Mini-Microsoft thought should happen if schedules slip, which has notably happened with Longhorn/Vista. Mini-Microsoft's advice:

"If you make a bad decision that trips up shipping key products on schedule it should be recognized as horrible failure. SteveB should throw your chair across the room and out the window - with you sitting in it. Chased with a good stream of swear words for you to listen to on your way down. "F------ slipping p----!" That's the leadership accountability I want to see!"

LOL, classic :-))

That's a wrap for another week!

This week: eBay-Skype: Web 2.0 Ramifications, The Real World - Katrina response, Microsoft PDC - Start.com extended, Yahoo Shopping API and Shopify, New apps on the block.

eBay-Skype: Web 2.0 Ramifications

Early this week eBay confirmed its acquisition of Skype for between $2.6 - 4.1 billion. On my ZDNet blog I looked at some of the Web 2.0 implications. Here is a summary of that post:

- One reason eBay bought Skype is to upgrade its communications platform. It will continue to run Skype as a standalone Internet Telephony business, but it will also use Skype's telephony and IM product line as a platform to extend its own e-commerce business. 

- eBay is also building up its community platform. With 157 million customers and a thriving buyer and seller community, eBay probably sees IP telephony and IM as the next level of functionality - much like Google recently releasing Google Talk.

- eBay is expanding its global presence, or its "global footprint" as they termed it. Skype is used worldwide, whereas eBay has limited worldwide presence. 

- Let's not forget that Skype is a desktop app and so eBay automatically gains a foothold on some 54 million PCs (the number of registered users Skype has).

- Also this brings eBay up to a new level. They're now playing polo with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft - instead of kicking a soccer ball around with Amazon and Ask Jeeves.

- So all up, I think the deal has a fair amount of promise for eBay to extend itself as a Web Platform company.

Interesting to note the dot com-like merger theme continued throughout the week, with rumours of an MSN-AOL deal. Or even more bubbleicious, an outright purchase of AOL by Microsoft, Google or Yahoo. Don't do it! Anyway that should hopefully be settled by the time I get to next week's Wrap-Up ;-)

The Real World - Katrina response

The response to Hurricane Katrina on the Web has been huge. Doing some research for the book I'm co-writing with Joshua Porter on Web 2.0 this week, I came across many examples of Web technologies used to help respond to the disaster. Wikis and blogs were set up, including the Katrina Help blogspot site and Wiki - created by several founders and members of the SEA EAT (South East Asian Earthquake And Tsunami) blog & wiki. 

The Hurricane Katrina relief effort also included: 

- mobile weblogs (aka moblogs); eg http://www.missingkatrina.com and http://www.safekatrina.com
- a webcasting portal offering streaming media
- public galleries and multimedia websites - e.g. http://katrina05.blogspot.com/ 
- photo-sharing sites
- Donation websites
- News digests using RSS 
- Aggregators - e.g. http://homepages.cwi.nl/~cilibrar/projects/a/aggs/ 
- Volunteer websites - e.g. www.hospitalreliefefforts.org
- Message Forums
- People and Shelter Finders
- And much more no doubt (please add to the comments if you know of other things - I'm researching for the book)

It's heartening to see the Web used in so many ways to help respond to natural disasters. That's what I call a Real World benefit of Web 2.0.

Microsoft PDC - Start.com extended

At their annual developers conference (PDC), Microsoft wowed a lot of developers with details of Office 12, Vista, RSS integration, and web APIs for four MSN sites. The highlight for me was its Start.com developments, as I've been following progress on Microsoft's web-based RSS Aggregator since the beginning. In fact Start.com went live on 1 September and during the PDC they announced extensions to it. 

The new Start.com is extensible and offers tools for developing what Microsoft is calling "web gadgets" - DHTML-based components. The idea is that these "gadgets" will be created by external developers and used within Start.com. There are more details at the Start Developer Center website and more thoughts from me here.

Yahoo Shopping API

This week Yahoo! released a Shopping API. Developers can use this API "to create applications and Web sites that search Yahoo's comparison shopping database, which contains millions of offers from thousands of merchants."

As Tim O'Reilly pointed out: "...the real test of whether this is interesting is going to be whether people start building new services in which Yahoo! shopping is just a component, rather than the main point."

On the topic of shopping and web apps, I discovered a promising new app being built currently - called shopify. It hasn't been released yet, but it aims to be a Web 2.0 e-commerce application. I think that means it'll include community and collaboration features. It's described more here:

"Shopify is a hosted e-commerce solution that removes the traditional barriers that have kept many individuals and small business from selling online. It is a Web 2.0 product that focuses on providing buyers and sellers with the features essential to completing e-commerce transactions."

Bonus link: Charles Coxhead has been thinking about "feed commerce", using Yahoo! stores XML feeds.

New apps on the block

Some new web apps that popped up this week:

- Pete Freitag has been busy developing neat stuff - dealazon uses Amazon's API to find deals and has RSS feeds too; dailymashup remixes Flickr, Del.icio.us, furl, and Yahoo; and tagbert is a tag search aggregator. 

- Netvibes: a "web 2.0 home page solution" powered by Ajax, with RSS feed reader. Looks like a cooler version of Google's personalized homepage. Not sure what the business plan is with Netvibes, as they're basically competing for non-geek users with Google, Yahoo and MSN! TechCrunch profile here.

- Meebo: Ajax instant messaging. TechCrunch said it allows users to "log into AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo instant messaging services from their [Meebo's] web page."

- goowy media: "goowy (re) is a set of solutions optimized for broadband users that offer an innovative fresh look at traditional web services including email, contacts, calendar, games, widgets and more".

- Yahoo Instant Search: "gives you answers as you type -- no more waiting!" Neat to play with, but not sure how useful :-)

- Tech Memeorandum: addictive blog news service goes live. My rave review here.

- Google Blog Search (yawn!)

That's a wrap for another week!

This week: Microsoft's Web 2.0 platform, Rich Clients, Acquisitions, Web 2.0 in The Real World, Techie Post of the week - Web Development Trends for 2006.

Microsoft's Web 2.0 platform

News this week that Microsoft is releasing a set of developer APIs for four MSN properties: MSN Virtual Earth, MSN Messenger, Start.com and MSN Search. The details of this "Web platform" strategy will be revealed at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles next week.

Surprisingly the news didn't get a lot of coverage, but the sites that did write about it focused on: the competition with Google ("Microsoft Web plan takes aim at Google" was CNET's heading); how Microsoft might be cannabilizing its flagship Office and Windows products; and "Microsoft's Web 2.0 Vision" (as TechNewsWorld phrased it). 

As I wrote in ZDNet, this is Microsoft's acknowledgement that the Web is now the place to be for developers and consumers. However I don't think the Web platform strategy is a primary one for Microsoft, I think they're more interested in dominating how their customers access the Web. If they can't own the platform, they want to own as many of the paths onto the platform as possible - which may then give them control over the platform. Broadly speaking, this is what Google wants to do too.

Rich Clients

The topic of 'rich clients' often comes up when talking about Web apps. Rich clients (aka smart clients) are usually Internet-connected desktop applications which offer a rich user experience - interactivity, drag'n'drop, high-end graphics, and so on. Their proponents say rich clients are better than browser-based apps because they have more (i.e. richer) functionality and can be used offline. In the age of broadband, offline usage is becoming increasingly irrelevant. But the richer functionality point is still a compelling one, despite what AJAX can do in a browser these days. 

Mike Chambers, from Macromedia Flash Platform Developer Relations, wrote a post recently that makes the case for rich clients in a Web 2.0 world:

"Web 2.0 gets really interesting when one can build clients that composite not just multiple data sources, but multiple rich data types, and start to build applications that really leverage the web as a platform in a much richer way with things like streaming media, VOIP, messaging and real-time data."

Mack D. Male has similar thoughts. My take is that it's still better not to be reliant on desktop (or proprietary) software, but I'm certainly open to richer functionality so long as its connected to the Web.

Acquisition Report

This week threw up some interesting acquisition rumours. Ebay is apparently in talks to buy Web telephony darlings Skype, which would be a deal worth anything between $2 billion and $5 billion. Some people thought it made sense as an extra communications channel for Ebay's buyers and sellers - IM and Internet phone. Others thought it made little strategic sense. David Beisel raises the intriguing question: if the deal occurs, will it mean connectivity is "worth more than content?"

Update: all but confirmed, eBay will buy Skype for "over $2.6bn" and possibly as much as $4.1 billion if Skype makes performance targets.

A confirmed acquisition this week was Newscorp's purchase of online gaming company IGN. As Techdirt pointed out, Newscorp appears to be on a mission to capture Generation Y eyeballs:

"Combined with his purchases of MySpace, Scout Media and (still potentially) Blinkx, it's becoming increasingly clear that News Corp is building up a stable of high traffic sites that cater to highly desirable demographics for advertisers."

Scott Rafer has more on that theme: "Murdoch wants the average age of the NewsCorp Internet customer to be Gen-Y or younger, which makes perfect sense for a new entrant into e-commerce."

Web 2.0 in The Real World

This is a new regular feature of my Weekly Wrap-Up, sort of a counterpoint to the Techie Post of the Week. I think it's important to highlight how Web 2.0 is being implemented in The Real World, by real people - i.e. not geeks like me or Ivory Tower folks.

The first Real World example is a Web Ministry, defined here:

"Web Ministry is using internet resources (namely the web) to utilize the gifts, talents, resources, and desires of a believer (church, organization, individual) to make an eternal impact in the lives of individuals."

Good start - now I want to hear how they're going to do it. That's what this segment of the Weekly Wrap-Up will be about - what's being built on the Web outside of the geek domain and how it's being done.

btw I found that post via their previous post on Web 2.0, which linked to my ZDNet blog:

"I feel dense. I've read a lot of definitions of what Web 2.0 is. The most recent "simple" explanation I read came from ZDNet.com. But I still don't get it. Can someone explain it in simple, dumb language? Better yet, give me an example of how it's different. I just don't get it. What I'm seeing is that it could be big and important. But I just don't get it right now."

[emphasis mine] I hear ya! And I'm working on it ;-)

Techie Post of the week - Web Dev Trends for 2006

Anil Dash's Web Development Trends for 2006 is an excellent overview of trends to look out for in 2006. He calls it "vocational education for people building Web 2.0". I particularly liked this comment about the continued appeal of XHTML and CSS:

"In a Greasemonkey-enabled web, it's going to be more important than ever to have a reliable structure that you can hang new behaviors on."

Amen brother.

That's a wrap for another week!