ReadWriteWeb

Richard Koman over at SiliconValleyWatcher gets the scoop from Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield, on whether Google will replicate Flickr's photo-sharing service (as suggested by Om Malik). Stewart is quoted as saying:

And Richard Koman adds:

Lately there's been a lot of speculation about whether the smaller Web 2.0 companies (e.g. Flickr, Bloglines, Feedburner, SixApart) will be able to foot it with the BigCo's (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon). Many people think the smaller companies will be acquired by the big co's - and this is actually a viable strategy for a smaller company - or be squashed by them. So it's refreshing to see one of the smaller company honchos come out and say: hey, we're not afraid of competing with Google.

One can't read too much into Stewart's response - it sounds pretty guarded and open-ended as to their future plans. Once they complete version 1.0, they may then be prepared to sell it to the likes of Google or Yahoo or Microsoft - who's to say? But I like that Stewart emphasizes that Flickr is best in its class in its niche, whereas Google is spreading itself over a number of niches these days. Good fighting talk ;-)

Flickr has built up a lot of whuffie, so that bottom-up market evolution may well be their saving grace when or if Google enters the photo-sharing market. And no I don't count Google's Picasa2 as being in the same ballgame as Flickr...yet.

Anybody with an interest in the publishing industry will be familiar with the dream of Print On Demand, whereby you order a book from a kiosk or similar service and a paper book is custom printed before your eyes. Former publishing honcho Jason Epstein is the person most commonly associated with this vision - he wrote a book about it (which I read last year) and recently published an essay at MIT Technology review called The Future of Books. Print on Demand is often seen as an alternative to eBooks, especially by those people unwilling to give up the aesthetic pleasure of paper books.

Well now the Print on Demand vision has crossed over to the blog world, which until now has been exclusively electronic (if you don't count 19th century pamphleteers as bloggers). A new service called blogbinders is offering to "turn your weblog into a book!" (hat-tip Andy Lark). It supports a variety of blog types, including Movable Type, LiveJournal, Typepad and Blogger.

Blogbinder's service is a 3-step process: first blogbinders has an automated service that downloads your blog content (sans HTML formatting and images), then you customize your book (including style, binding and cover work) using either a Wizard interface or self-selection, lastly you proof it and "the Blogbinders system will build a PDF file of your book exactly as it will be printed." Then it's apparently all set for printing and you can order as many copies as you want.

The pricing seems at first glance to be very reasonable. There's a small binding fee and it's then a per-page fee of 3-5 cents. One example they give is a 125 page "Perfect Bound" book, which you can get for $15.70. Even better, blogbinder seems to be gearing up to offer a "re-seller program" that will effectively let you retail your own book. Here's how they put it:

Blogbinders also has plans for new features, such as ability to add comments for LiveJournal users. Will that be the start of a socially-authored book craze? It's along the same lines as what I discussed with Tim O'Reilly in my interview with him last year. A LiveJournal blog + comments as a book would be an example of mixing books with social networking. Lots of potential.

Another idea blogbinders has is to add "ability to download your content in XML or another format for re-use outside of our system (possible fee based service)". Re-using content is a big theme in the blog world, so this feature would be another win-win from this blog-paper crossover.

The Blogbinders creators have a LiveJournal blog and there's also a community discussion board. It all sounds promising and if it'll bring the social software and publishing worlds closer together, then I'm 100% for it. Incidentally, it's also a great example of a Web 2.0 service - it uses the Web as a platform for writing, ordering, customizing, printing and retailing books. End to end via the Web, yet the end product is paper-based. Sounds a little perverse, but you gotta love it!

Alf Eaton has come up with a neat little de.icio.us hack. It lists out the "speediest gatherers" for your del.icio.us page (last 100 items), based on the posting date of items. I think this means it lists out the people who linked to the same thing as you, but got there before you did. So the idea is that this list may help you find people who are interested in the same things as you, but who are faster than you at linking to them. Potentially then, this could save you the hassle of searching the Web yourself for those nuggets of information. Just wait for the fast-movers in your niche to link to them on delicious - kind of like a human version of the topic/tag/remix feeds I've been talking about. Here is my list, supplied by Alf:

My Gatherers (ricmac)

Quick Analysis

I think one bias to this system is that the more popular a link is, then the more people will link to it, and thus it'll likely generate a higher score on your list. There'll also be more people on your list, the more you link to popular items. On the other hand, a high score could flag a person who shares the same niche interests as you - which is what Alf's script hopes to eek out. You'll need to click through to each person to find out. 

The fact that only four people scored above 2 on my list (and one of them is me!) indicates that I don't generally link to popular items. Either that, or I'm very fast on the uptake - which I know is not true! 

Take a look at this list for a delicious user called acidzebra, to see the difference.

acidzebra's Gatherers

[...plus a heap of others with score of 2 or less]

Postscript, 4/2/05: I lost the last two paragraphs of this post, because MT couldn't handle the length of it. But what I had written was that if you check out acidzebra's delicious page, you'll see that it includes a lot of items with 100+ links (the deeper the red of the highlights, the more popular an item is). So this I think accounts for the relative high scores on his Gatherers list, as well as its length.

I'm trying to figure out what 'Web 2.0' means to people. These are the reasons why I'm trying to figure this out:

* I want to define it so that my tagline makes sense to people :-)

* Web 2.0 is my niche topic. It's my little piece of The Long Tail and I want to attract more readers and subscribers to it. Ideally I'd like my blog to appeal not just to webheads, but other people whose careers and lives are being transformed by the Web (e.g. journalists, educators, investment analysts). 

* I'd also like to attract some sponsors, or patrons. So I want to know how they view Web 2.0.

* I want to subscribe to more topic/tag/remix feeds about Web 2.0, so therefore I need to find out the synonyms, related words and key phrases.

del.icio.us tags for Web 2.0 content

To investigate what words and phrases people associate with Web 2.0, I took a close look at two popular Web 2.0-ish articles and noted what tags people stored them under in del.icio.us. The first post was Adam Rifkin's fantastic Weblications. It currently has 99 people linking to it on del.icio.us and here is an excel chart showing the top tags:

The most popular are "web", "google" and "programming".

The next article I looked at was Adam Bosworth's influential ISCOC04 Talk, which currently has 122 outbound del.icio.us links. Here is a chart for that:

Again, "web" and "programming" are the most-used tags.

I should note that Rifkin didn't use the phrase "Web 2.0" in his post (he's coined his own: The Web Way) and Bosworth only mentioned it once. Nevertheless, both posts discussed at great length the benefits of using the Web as a platform - and so I would've thought people would link the content in their minds to "Web 2.0". It seems not - only 3 del.icio.us users tagged Bosworth's with "web 2.0" and I think I was the only person to do so with Rifkin's post. Hmmm, looks like I need to define "Web 2.0" then ;-)

Defining Web 2.0

I've been busily storing links about Web 2.0 in del.icio.us over the past month. Here are 10 excellent definitions that I've come across:

John Battelle (talking about upcoming conferences): "eTech is where the seeds of new and interesting technologies are first discovered, whilst Web 2.0 is where they take root in the soil of business."

Kingsley Idehen: "...a Point of Presence on the Web for exposing of invoking Web Services and/or Syndicating or Subscribing to XML based content."

Wirearchy: "According to the experts, Web 2.0 is on its way to the workplace soon – it's an infrastructure that's decentralized and more open than that which exists today."

Jon Udell (as quoted in a classic essay by Tim O'Reilly): "Don't think of the Web as a client-server system that simply delivers web pages to web servers. Think of it as a distributed services architecture, with the URL as a first generation "API" for calling those services."

The World 2 Come (talking about the Web 2.0 Conference in October 04): "The conference will debut with the theme of 'The Web as Platform,' exploring how the Web has developed into a robust platform for innovation across many media and devices - from mobile to television, telephone to search."

Deep Green Crystals: "The next generation of web applications will leverage the shared infrastructure of the web 1.0 companies like EBay, Paypal, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, not just the "bare bones transit" infrastructure that was there when we started..."

Jeff Bezos: "web 2.0...is about making the Internet useful for computers."

computeruser.com: "Yesterday’s challenge of producing elegant and database-driven Web sites is being replaced by the need to create Web 2.0 'points of presence'"

Adam Rifkin: "They don't see that the power of Weblications is that "simplicity and flexibility beat optimization and power in a world where connectivity is key", as Adam Bosworth put it."

Mitch Kapor: "The web browser and the infrastructure of the World Wide Web is on the cusp of bettering its aging cousin, the desktop-based graphical user interface for common PC applications."

My Definition

So what's my definition of Web 2.0? Well I prefer the succinct "The Web as Platform", because I can then fill in the blanks depending on who I'm talking to. For corporate people, the Web is a platform for business. For marketers, the Web is a platform for communications. For journalists, the Web is a platform for new media. For geeks, the Web is a platform for software development. And so on.

Keywords from those 10 quotes

Point of Presence; Web Services; Syndication; decentralization; open; distributed services architecture; API; The Web as Platform; innovation; media and devices; infrastructure; utility/usefulness; simplicity and flexibility; connectivity; web browser.

Keywords don't match del.icio.us tags

It's interesting that very few of the keywords I've picked out above were used as tags in delicious for the Rifkin and Bosworth articles. The tags used were much more generalised - e.g. web, programming, design. The tags also lean towards the techy side, but that's not so surprising because both articles were technical in nature.

This indicates to me that people aren't yet familiar with the term "web 2.0" and so will stick to general terms when tagging links on this topic. Perhaps this presents an opportunity for me to evangelize Web 2.0.

It could also mean that Web 2.0 is the wrong term to use in my tagline and my posts, because so few people currently use it. But I think it will become more popular over time. I'm betting if people like Tim O'Reilly, John Battelle and Jeff Bezos are using it (as far as I know it was coined by the first two) then it's going to get adopted by more people in due course. I always like to be in the 'first mover' crowd when it comes to the Web ;-)

UPDATE:: Andrew Watson makes a very good point in response to this post:

Thanks Andrew, you're spot on! I'll make that my next assignment :-)

In lieu of a weekly Web 2.0 wrap-up (because nothing much happened this week), I did a cut-up of a recent blog post by ex-Microsoft employee and now Google employee Mark Jen. This is the guy who recently started a job at Google and is blogging about his experiences there. He pulled his blog off-air this week, after it got discovered and dissected by the media and other bloggers. But thankfully, Mark is back again! His post comparing Google with Microsoft is worth a read. I've done a bit of cut-up poetry with it, care of the Grazulis Cut-Up Machine and Word AutoSummarize. I swear this is unedited by me, except for adding linebreaks and the title...

Ode to Google (Microsoft I bid thee farewell)

best that was put in this microsoft.

right.
doesn't work as heart's product
microsoft world
that actually to possible of
in we're industry, of associate
at were current organize people on.

so time past software ways.
well way,
of products how would
where the –
far this microsoft longhorn,
and on.

exploring software
are need and productivity
into absorb
microsoft that can
is striking our infrastructure.
anymore is time.

which other apms
shipped much unlimited work
than internet lots population
i'll peculiarity spend my 20
in all stuff
that where dream is.

anyways, me google, productive;
and make true.

Jay Fienberg wrote a very interesting post regarding the future of RSS aggregators and blogs:

He terms this "creative aggregation" and lists Technorati tags, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Webjay as examples of this. He likens it to music DJ's, who are "aggregators of existing recordings" but have also "became creators in their development of playlists". This is all part of the Remix Culture we're currently in the middle of building.

He suggests that the developers of services like Bloglines, Flickr, delicious and Webjay need to continue to build on their creative aggregation functionality - in order to stay ahead of their competitors. I understood this better when I read Lucas Gonze's interpretation:

I think a good role model for this type of editorial functionality is Amazon. Ever since they opened for business in 1995 (10 years ago, seems like an eternity in Web time!), Amazon has provided interactive functionality on their site and they raise the bar every year. Although their core task is to aggregate information about their products - e.g. books - what makes Amazon stand out from its competitors is their ability to creatively mine that aggregated data and enable users to do all sorts of things with it. Including, most importantly, contributing to the data (user reviews, etc). Which of course leads to more content/data to aggregate! That's an important point - creative aggregation feeds off itself, by creating ever more data for users to aggregate and remix.

The companies that most excite me in the Web 2.0 era are those that, like Amazon, are aggregating content and enabling users to do remixes of it and build on it. Letting users mix and dance to their own tunes, rather than serving up the usual top 40 fare. Flickr and del.icio.us are the two most obvious examples, but I think PubSub and Feedburner are two other examples where content is not only aggregated - but enhanced, remixed, personalized, composed.

Interesting edition of the Gillmor Gang this week, focusing on RSS and Web content models. The guests were Stephen O'Grady from analyst firm Redmonk and Rafat Ali from the excellent PaidContent.org.

Event-driven

Jon Udell launched into an interesting spiel around the 18 minute mark. He talked about some of the usage scenarios for RSS in the enterprise. Basically his point was that RSS is not just about collaboration, it's also an event-driven technology that can be used to monitor business processes. In Jon's words:

He cited KnowNow, who offer an "event network as an integration platform". [note to self: I must listen to Jon's podcast about KnowNow]

Most bloggers (myself included) tend to natter on about the social aspects of RSS - collaboration, two-way communication and so forth. So I like the phrase "event network", because it emphasizes the time-driven aspect of RSS that is often overlooked in favour of the more glamourous social software angles.

Jon also noted that people can integrate and combine streams of content - for example, you could take a Feedster-indexed query and "make that query into another feed", or a del.icio.us tag could become "a feed that feeds into something else." This line of thinking complements my posts last week about topic/tag/remix feeds [post one, post two].

RSS Revenue Strategies

Rafat had some interesting things to say about how RSS is playing out in the marketplace. He mentioned that Feedburner has "yet to come out with a viable revenue strategy" - which I think he said to illustrate that the RSS/content business is still nascent and clear revenue streams have yet to emerge from it. As for his own business, Rafat said he hasn't yet sold RSS as a media option to his sponsors. He isn't sure about the "viability of RSS audience" - will it be a separate buy from the Web/email/etc audiences.

Re-defining Analyst

There was a bit of back and forth between the Gang and the guests about that old chestnut: are bloggers journalists? Also asked: are bloggers analysts? Stephen O'Grady's company Redmonk is styling itself as a new kind of Analyst service, meaning:

Rafat said he is still a journalist, but he sees himself as "a quasi-analyst" these days - he "assimilates all this information", presents it as such and tries to make sense of it. But unlike a traditional journalist, he gives his point of view. Rafat is at the same time trying to build a media company, so he's also an entrepreneur.

Summary

Another fine Gillmor Gang production. If I may make a request, I'd love to see them snare an interview with Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher and/or Feedburner's Dick Costolo. Or Technorati's Dave Sifry, or Scott Rafer from Feedster, or PubSub honcho Bob Wyman. I'm interested in the Gang exploring the emerging RSS marketplace some more.

This year I've been focusing on Web 2.0 themes in my posts, but yesterday I received two emails from people responding to a couple of older Read/Write Web posts. Those emails reminded me of the personal nature of blogging and that it's about keeping it real.

The first email was from Debi Smith, in response to my review of Bob Dylan's autobiography. Debi wrote:

Needless to say, that's the sort of response a writer (or blogger) wants to receive from his or her readers every now and then. Thanks Debi for your inspiring email - and allowing me to share it here.

Just two hours later I got an email from another person who had stumbled across my blog. Lee Corbin wrote about my pre-podcasting audio experiment last July:

I wrote back to Lee and told him all about podcasting and how the best of it (e.g. IT Conversations) blows my amateurish early audio attempts out of the water. But of course I enjoyed receiving the complement :-)

So two fantastic emails from people I don't know, but who identified with things I've written and/or recorded over the past year. That's what blogging is all about, as well as the topic-focused content. That sort of response encourages me to continue to write book reviews and personal stuff every now and then - in addition to my main content focus of Web Technology. Gotta keep making it come alive.

Some of the Web 2.0 trends and talk I tracked this week... accompanied by some dodgy Austin Powers subheaders.

Tagalicious, baby, yeah!

Flickr and del.icio.us made tagging cool, now every social software app is doing it. Technorati, The Robot Co-op and Metafilter were among the companies braggin' about taggin' this week. There was also a fair amount of hand-wringing on the pros and cons of tagging - Many-to-Many covered a lot of it and Joshua Porter summarized why tagging is a good thing.

I shall call him… Mini-me

Bit of talk in the blog world this week about Big Internet companies buying little ones. The Internet Stock Blog asked: will Yahoo acquire Six Apart?

In another neck of the blogosphere, Andrew Chen of Monkey Methods (nb: a different Andrew Chen from the one in my blogroll) suggested that Feedster and Technorati "will die". Death in this context meaning that they end up as "a discount acquisition by one of the portals". Andrew gave 5 reasons and the gist of 1-4 was that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are too big and strong for Feedster and Technorati. OK, he may have a point there. The 5th reason is interesting:

I think Andrew is wrong on that score and Feedster CEO Scott Rafer hinted in the comments why:

With my Design for Data theory (see also my most recent post on it), I'm exploring a new type of design paradigm for Web 2.0. Feedster and Technorati are among the companies building this new paradigm. Here's a hint Andrew - it's not about "stickiness and pageviews" anymore.

Amazon's Groovy Developers Conference

Huge props to the Amazon Web Services Blog for real-time blogging of Amazon DevCon. I particularly enjoyed the notes of Rael Dornfest's talk, entitled Remix: beyond rip, mix, burn. It inspired me to remix some of the notes into my own post entitled Remixing and Speculation on The Future of RSS, with the theme of Information Remixing. 

The 'future of RSS' bit was this: in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people. I wrote a follow-up post fleshing that idea out a bit.

Google's Juice

Narry a week goes by without Google making some news. This week they hacked around with one of the Web's fundamental principles - the link. Google created a "no-follow" attribute for the hyperlink, to try and thwart comment spammers. News.com reported:

Here's Google's statement in the Google Blog. John Batelle has some good analysis on it. 

John also reported on the Google AdWords API, a new advertising platform perhaps? John said:

Schwimmer tries to take away Bloglines' mojo

Lawyer Martin Schwimmer opened up a can of worms this week, with his request (granted) to have his RSS feed removed from Bloglines. I followed the action in this post. As yet Bloglines has not publicly responded to the controversy, but I'm sure we'll be hearing more about this issue in the coming months. For a more light-hearted take on it (or is it?!), check out Dennis Kennedy's post.

To follow-up on my rather bold prediction for RSS in my previous post: "in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people." 

One of the reasons I think this may eventuate is that blogging is and always will be a minority sport (as I've referred to it in the past). The killer app for RSS probably won't be geared towards the current ranks of bloggers and geeks. When RSS hits it big, it'll be because 'normal' people start using it - your Mom and Dad, Frank from Marketing, Jessie from Payroll, Dave from the local dairy. They won't be bloggers. They won't be interested in writing or podcasting or anything like that. All they'll want to do is track news and trends that are relevant to them. 

Tools will evolve to let people easily set-up personalized searches for information relevant to them and subscribe to the results - using, you guessed it, RSS! Google will probably be the front-runner (see this video for a hint to the future - thanks twdanny for the reminder), PubSub will be another, current players like Bloglines and Technorati will be in amongst it, and who knows who else.

But don't get me wrong, conversations and people will still be important. It's just that if 'normal' people won't be bloggers (one of my assumptions), then the community aspects of the blogosphere won't be so important to them. This doesn't mean they won't subscribe to people - normal folk will find niche writers and podcasters and so on and subscribe to them. But it'll be far more convenient and useful for a lot of people to subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds and trust the tools to filter the right information through to them, including content from niche bloggers. 

On this theme, David Smith from Preoccupations wrote a post about the Google "nofollow" meme, which led him to comment:

I replied in David's blog that I didn't mean to imply that conversations or people are unimportant. On the contrary, topic/tag/remix feeds will make it even easier to find the conversations that matter to you and indeed you are more likely to meet new people and discover new points of view. Separateness is less of an issue with topic/tag/remix feeds, than it is without them. Topic/tag/remix feeds are more inclusive for all types of people (see this oldie but a goodie for more on this).

Summary

In 2005 in the blogosphere, RSS is a community-enabler. You find someone you like and you subscribe to them, and conversations ensue. What I'm suggesting is that in the future RSS will still be a community enabler, but by far its biggest use will be as a means to subscribe to personalised news and other information important to the lives of non-blogging people. Examples of the information I'm talking about: stocks, bank statements, weather, information needed for one's job, sports news, niche information (the long tail), lots of other things we can't predict yet ;-)

Amazon DevCon is happening right now and happily the Amazon Web Services Blog is blogging it in "near-real-time" (hat-tip to Greg Linden for linking to it). I haven't browsed through all the notes from day 1 yet, but I feel compelled to post about Rael Dornfest's speech on the subject of "remix: beyond rip, mix, burn". Some real gems in this...

--> Rael: "Remixing requires good source, inspiration, skill, trial and error, magic, and some combinatorics."

I had to look up 'combinatorics'. The Wikipedia definition is too complex (but no doubt correct). I like this simpler, user-friendly, definition of Combinatorics: "The branch of mathematics dealing with the number of different ways objects can be selected or arranged."

--> Rael on data remixing:

--> The following has got to be the most concise attempt yet at explaining how blogging is impacting on journalism (and there have been a lot of non-concise attempts!): "Blogging [is] remixing journalism"

--> On RSS:

--> Finally, here's the speech in a nutshell:

Information Remixing

Note that a lot of Rael's speech referenced hacking, as befits a conference for Web Services developers. But the highlights I've picked out are just as relevant to Information Remixing, which is I guess my forte.

I frequently talk about remixing (ref: a search of my blog for the word "remix"). For example, take this excerpt from a post I wrote nearly a year ago:

"We can mix and match RSS feeds as we (the "consumers") see fit. Perhaps future generations of tools like Blogdigger Groups will allow us to mix and match microcontent, much like a DJ scratching a rap song on top of a Beatles melody."

In 2005 we're starting to see tools that make such remixing of data possible - and that's exciting. e.g. did you know that in PubSub you can create custom RSS feeds using combinations of topics, people, sites, data types, and other things.

Future of RSS - One Scenario

Here's a prediction from me on the future of RSS: in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people. Is that a scary thought?

Here are some notes taken from John Doerr's talk at the Web 2.0 Conference, held October 2004 in San Francisco. Thanks to IT Conversations for recording it!

John Doerr is a well-known venture capitalist, who apparently had the foresight to back Google in 1999 when few others did. His Web 2.0 speech had a lot of insightful nuggets and tantalizing snippets of insight. I got the feeling he was holding a lot back, but that's to be expected from someone who is on the board of both Google and Amazon. Still, very worthwhile listening to. Or if you can't be bothered listening, here are my notes:

Parallel Webs

After about 10 minutes of banter and rambling, it got interesting at the 11.40 minute mark. That's when Doerr launched into his Web 2.0 theories. He started by saying "...take the idea of the string theory and apply it to the Web", which led to his suggestion that there are "at least 6 parallel webs." Although this caused a round of titters in the audience, I think everyone was on tenterhooks! So the 6 parallel webs are:

* Near Web -> the PC upfront; "innovations are around services"; examples: Friendster, Visible Path

* Far Web -> tv web; people don't interact with it as much; e.g. Akimbo.com, which delivers video to your tv set

* Here Web -> one that is "ubiquitously pervasive"; e.g. phones

* Weird Web -> "talk to and it talks back to you" e.g. 3D VRML where the perspective changes; An example company is TellMe, which offers voice recognition over your phone (e.g. directory assistance - AT&T uses it)

* B2B Web -> the plumbing behind the scenes (xml, rss, web services - eg amazon); example: "companies building and promoting wikis".

* D2D Web -> Device Web (e.g. RFID info, remote sensors, smart dust)

He puts the 6 Webs under rubric of "EverNet". The most interesting one sounded like the "Weird Web", which John said had "opportunity for innovation" further into the future.

Platforms

Doerr talked a bit about platforms. The OS as a platform was followed by databases (eg p2p), and now we have web / web services / "search in particular" ("a very powerful platform").

He said browsers are not so much a platform, but "a great enabler". People in the Netscape era used the browser as a thin client. He said that "most of the old web-based services [Web 1.0] are in the process of being systemically reinvented - including the browser." He reckons "browsers are going to come back", but dismissed the likelihood of Google doing a browser.

Opportunities

When questioned what are the opportunities or markets open for entrepreneurs, Doerr said there is scope for "lots of web services-based companies". In particular "really targeted services for the explosive Hand Web" [aka the Here Web] - for example, social services and tracking services.

"We live in time and we're assaulted by events", Doerr went on to say. He wants filters to be developed so that we're only assaulted by "the most relevant information". That's a "Google-sized" technical challenge, but an example of something he'd invest in. There are also opportunities to tackle information that is not currently on the Web - he gave the example of a video company that could aggregate all the backlist info about videos.

But he cautioned that a lot of those types of opportunities will go to "the larger companies" and the smaller innovators should be wary of "getting in the way" of Google, Amazon, EBay or Yahoo!.

Looks like the first salvo has been fired in what is sure to be an ongoing controversy over contextual advertising using RSS. Martin Schwimmer, a trademark lawyer, has asked Bloglines to remove his RSS feed from their service - and Bloglines has complied. Schwimmer publishes his website using a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution licence and he claims that "Bloglines' reproduction of my site is a commercial derivative work".

In a follow-up post, Schwimmer references one of my posts from late December 2004 - entitled Contextual Adverts in Bloglines in 2005. In that post I'd discussed Bloglines plan to introduce contextual advertising into their service in 2005. I wrote a follow-up post a day later (based on a great comment by Charles Coxhead), questioning whether Bloglines can use other peoples content as a base for contextual advertising. So now, a few weeks later, Martin Schwimmer is the first person to force the issue with Bloglines. 

Schwimmer has gotten some kick-back from other bloggers. Robert Scoble asks why doesn't Martin just publish excerpted RSS feeds? A very good question and it's certainly the method most of us would use to get around this issue. And paidcontent.org suggests: "A better solution -- since he's advertising his firm -- would be to insert an info line in every post that comes through the feed." 

But I think Schwimmer's beef with Bloglines is less about pragmatics and more about the (legal) principles he feels strongly about. Or as he puts it:

You know it's about principles when words such as "unfair" and "wrong" get bandied about, especially by lawyers. 

I'm not sure what to make of this yet, but I would guess that Bloglines has been trying to nut out this very issue for the past few months - at least. The fact is, we don't know what Bloglines plans are for contextual advertising. We know that Bloglines plans to introduce contextual ads in 2005, but they haven't yet revealed the what and the how. So Schwimmer's action seems like a preemptive strike in a way. But he is a lawyer and so he will have a better grasp of the legal principles involved than most of us. It'll be interesting to see how this issue pans out in 2005.

Update: Russell Beattie points out the Web 2.0 angle:

I agree with Russ, because I use Bloglines the same way. However I think Schwimmer would argue that unlike a desktop app, Bloglines is re-publishing his content on the Web and (he argues anyway) with the intention of commercially gaining from it. Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if a desktop app started to place adverts in or around peoples RSS feeds? I guess that would be a similar type of thing to what Schwimmer is accusing Bloglines of doing (or what he thinks they intend to do).

Update 2: I like this comment by Georg Bauer in the comments to a Phil Pearson post:

I think Georg hit the nail on the head on where Schwimmer is coming from. Bottom line: there are a lot of fluid borders and fine lines involved here ;-)

Update 3: Dennis Kennedy likens the Bloglines preview function (example) to a doppelganger of his website. Doppelganger is one of my all-time favourite words - ever read Dostoyevsky's The Double? It was also one of the themes in my Nanowrimo novel, Dirtside to Spaceside. Anyway, this is a great post by Dennis - I still haven't worked out if it's a piss-take though? I think it is, but the issues are of course serious :-)

Time for a look back at the week that was in Web 2.0. In no particular order...

1. Gizmodo's 4-part interview with Bill Gates ended with Bill insisting that DRM is a good thing because it protects your medical records (or something like that). In part one of the interview, Gates mentioned blogging - said it was "super-important". Part two was probably the most relevant to Web 2.0-watchers, because it covered the topic of "Windows Post-Longhorn" (in Gizmodo's words). I remember discussing a similar topic with Tim O'Reilly in November - Tim said that "Microsoft will continue to dominate on the PC, but the PC is going to be a smaller and smaller part of the entire business." Bill Gates in the Gizmodo interview continued to hype the PC, but I think the following quote indicates that Microsoft is at the same time branching out from the PC significantly: 

My take: in the Web 2.0 world, Microsoft wants its software to control as many internet-connected devices as possible. While Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Yahoo look to dominate on 'the cloud' (i.e. the Web), Microsoft is aiming more at the device-level (PC, phones, set-top box, etc).

2. Talk this week of other browser-based RSS Aggregators - i.e. some competition for Bloglines. Robert Scoble mentioned two recent beta products: Lektora and Onfolio. Also someone in Robert's comments pointed out Pluck (which I must check out, because it sounds awesome). 

btw whatever happened to Lucmo? In mid-2003, they were the only one apart from Bloglines building a browser-based RSS Aggregator. But now they've fallen completely off the radar. Pity, because their vision sounded very promising at the time (and Bloglines has of course since proven it was the right strategy to do a browser-based aggregator).

3. The biggest Web 2.0 news this week was Feedburner's release of their statistics for RSS Aggregator market share, prompted by my post on the same subject in December. I discussed Feedburner's stats in detail here and here. Mainstream geek media site Internetnews.com ran a story about it, quoting yours truly! SiliconBeat also had a good take on it, focusing on how big Bloglines is getting. 

The upshot of it all? The stats are extremely interesting and clearly show that Bloglines has a significant lead in the RSS Aggregator market, however there are a number of caveats about the data. I think Dick Costolo, CEO of Feedburner, said it best in the comments on my blog: "...it is still a young market very much in flux, and one shouldn't draw enormous conclusions from the single data point." Dick also mentioned that they "will be posting lots of other slices of the data over time" - cool!

4. Wired editor Chris Anderson is posting a lot of great nuggets about The Long Tail. If you want to get an understanding of how niche markets are taking over the media landscape, I strongly recommend you subscribe to Chris' blog. He's writing a book about it and the blog is one method he's using to gather information. Choice quote: "Practically every time there's been an expansion of access to a wide variety of goods, we've seen shifts in the demand curve toward niches." 

David Jackson over at The Internet Stock Blog also has some fascinating theories on this subject - for example he predicts that the likes of CNET and Yahoo! are at risk from "niche, category-killing, advertising-supported Web sites that get high placement in algorithmic search engine results and, once discovered, attract repeat-readers."

5. News of a promising new open source project called The Dojo Toolkit. It aims "to create a UI toolkit that allows a larger number of web application authors to easily use the rich capabilities of modern browsers." Lucas Gonze likes the sound of it. I'm not entirely sure what it's all about yet, but I found this description on the mailing list:

Sounds good to me! Well that's it for another week. Hope you're enjoying these weekly summaries of Web 2.0 news, views and ideas. :-)