The perfect storm, 2-5 years out

IBM didn’t see it coming, but Microsoft does. They are smart. That’s why we’re aligned with them. 😉

What is this perfect storm? What happened to IBM? IBM got hit by the PC revolution, economies of scale. The tremendous book “The long tail” makes two superb points:

1. The internet allows the long tail to operate, where brick and mortar stores truncate this natural phenomena – by restoring the long tail to your business you can add up to 35% to your revenue
2. The world economy always reorganizes itself around free (or near free) resources. When we built ships, the seas were “free” to sail on and so we sailed and traded. And so on, as growth reveals more “free”, the world adjusts economically around that free resource. China, India, Indonesia and Russia suddenly revealed near free (relative to US and European salaried rates) employees and the world reorganized around that.

Item one above is interesting… item two is compelling. And now we have Google. Their stuff is free. And Microsoft’s stuff is not. Now hold on… before you sigh and give up and close the browser, just stick with me and see where this is going. I suggesting that like the discovery of ships led to a vast new past time (sailing and trading) this free resource will lead to things only 1 year away that we never imagined.

What is Google offering… when you swallow these facts, you might be able to see why Microsoft is plunking down $2billion per year to create their own data-centers!

I don’t open MS Office any more

Google GMail was good. Google Apps for your domain is awesome. (Google Apps). I now send and receive through gmail but using my EXISTING company email addresses. NOT my gmail address. Since I moved to the Google Apps version of GMail, I only opened Outlook to export my contacts. Really. Bye bye Outlook. Google Writely is a free Ms Word, Google Spreadsheets… except that it’s free. Google Calendar.

I doubt I will renew my MS Office subs… I don’t need it any more! I simply do not use it. Except for the development environment, like Atlas and so on. But as my next point explains, that might not be for too long.

UPDATE: Today I opened Frontpage to edit some HTML. 

No more SQL Server licenses?

Google got my corporate mail and of everyone working on reBlogger. What else will they take?

You might not get that heading right away. Look at this. You know about Google Base where I can define my data structure and then generate pages to expose the data. The data is hosted by Google’s servers.

Now entering into this picture is Google Base and the Google Database API where you can write against this “GData” and access it from your own servers. Unlimited free data hosting on a server where you don’t have to worry about scalability? No more budgeting for 20 million of backend server racks. This is profound. Sayonara to SEO… look at the BASE slogan: “post it on base. find it on google”.

UPDATE: I found an article about gbase being moved into the retail sector. Lookout amazon!
I know what you’re thinking… the latency between your server and the Google servers would make it unworkable. But what if they hosted the application, just as they now host my company email? Enter Google Page Creator.

It’s all free

I confidently said to my co-worker about 2 months ago that within 1 year I wouldn’t be using MS Office any more. He doubted me. It’s 2 months later. I don’t use MS Office any more.

I am hesitant to say when we will stop using the .NET web developer stuff… there is far more for Google to have to build before I can use it. But the offer of not having to build an enormous backend for my online reBlogger business is just so tantalizing. Not having to write code for storing and indexing the masses of data that reBlogger collects and stores… ohhh yeaahhh.

Every blogging company (eg wordpress etc.) would just leap at free hosting of their data. You bet! And automatic inclusion into the Google results!? Of course! Woohoo!

But look a bit further down the road. Take technorati as an example. If they built for the Google “Platform” (developers! developers! developers!) then they wouldn’t need to collect their own data, they simply use GData to mine the EXISTING Google data store. Now can you imagine what we could do if Google hooked GData into their existing data store?

This idea is already being explored by the Alexa crew with their APIs, but they don’t appear to have the vision and based on my interaction with them during the year, they don’t value interaction with mere mortals and don’t want to meet the needs of these mere mortals. Hey, that’s ok, Google or Microsoft will.

Why Microsoft won’t be an IBM

Because Gates is smart enough to see this coming. Oh, wait. Gates is leaving. But they will see it, I have no doubt about it. Their decision to spend $2billion on server farms tells me that they are responding. But their cash cows are under threat. Someone is cow-tipping over night and we KNOW who is doing it. hehehe.

Industry organizes around near free resources

Google are inventing the “ship” (in the analogy) and the industry will begin to re-organize around the free resource that has been exposed to us: unlimited bandwidth, unlimited hosting, unlimited scalability.
The thing is that they are making money, theirs is not a bubble economy. The revenue model is usage based. It’s going to be interesting!

Licensing is available reBlogger

reBlogger is a poduct that is destined to become a standard component of every “backoffice”.

Every company with bloggers must have a way of tracking those bloggers and managing their output. Many other companies will also use reBlogger to track industry news and still more companies will create internal R&D depatments to slice and dice the valuable comments made within their industries. For these reasons and more reBlogger is a product whose time has come.

Sell us into your vertical market

We’re looking for sales companies who are interested in licensing our engine from us. Because our product has such broad appeal, we need partners in all vertical markets:

• government
• military
• motor
• sports
• science
• industry
• etc.

If you’re a consulting company or a software vendor, our reBlogger software might make a good fit for your product offering.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

It’s hard to be the leader because quite often the second mover has a clear goal to replicate and improve upon. The first mover has no road map to follow, only innovaion, vision, gut feel, customer feedback and instinct.

We’re already aware that we are being cloned by another company (right down to the design of our web pages) thanks to a user from that company spilling the beans. Someone once said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess this is flattery then?

The truth is when they see reBlogger 4.0 they will perhaps give up and go find another less innovative product to copy. If not, the innovations in reBlogger 5.0 will put an end to their aspirations once and for all. 5.0 will introduce features that will cause a storm on the internet, they are truly world-first never-been-seen-before features.

So why license our software?

We have two major advantages over any competitor:

1. IP laws protect us. This means that – as the first mover – we can slow them down and besides that, what they are doing (cloning) is illegal. At the very least they will owe us a % of their revenues if they make money.
2. Copying is not innovative, leadership is innovative. We have a big vision of where this is all going and although I have shared some of the future vision on this blog, I have not shared the truly ground breaking stuff.

If your company sells into major vertical markets and you have existng company sals relationships – then please contact me about purchasing a license to sell reBlogger into your industry. Contact me: markwilson at topxml.com

Responding to expresso’s forum comments

Hi expresso

Thanks for your comments in our forum.

We really appreciate your comments, it’s wonderful for us to have such excellent and raw feedback. Keep it coming! We’re beginning to pick up contacts in very large organizations (who have figured out the value of trackng bloggers) and we’re also being approached by a company doing due-diligence on us.

Things are happening in the reBlogger-sphere!

But you made some good points… so it’s confession time. reBlogger is obviously the first product of it’s kind and we’ve been building it for 18 months and running it on our own websites, one of which has 15k unique visitors per day: TopXML. We’e very fortunate to have users like Tony John and yourself who give us frank, honest and useful suggestions about how to improve RB.

But because reBlogger is so ground breakingly new, it’s very difficult for us to know just how people plan to use it. So we’ve had to build the bridge over the river while we’re actually walking on the bridge – does that analogy make sense?

What I’m saying is that we’re building it as fast as we can and the more feedback we get, the more we can figure out what the priority is to build next. We have improvements and features for MANY years and versions to come… we just need to figure out what people need more… improvements (like performance) or more features? I think the demand is for both. So we’ve decided to work on improvements for a time, then switch to features for a time, then back to improvements – and so on. You’ll be happy to know we’re working on improvements right now.

Of course, you’re not interested in our “problems” you just want to know when you’re going to get a more usable product.

We are about to launch a minor update which has:

• an improved or more robust install – based on your suggestions about what confuses you and what details are missing
• a simpler install which removes the need for keywords before it begins to run
• improved scalability for massive installations
• improved robustness (debugging etc.)
• improved fetching based on Tony John’s suggestions

Then in the next iteration of development, focussed on features we will be building some o the things you mentioned like calendars and gadgets. We’re also working on very easy drag and drop redesign of the look and feel, draggable reordering, search and much much more.

So I hope you’ll accept this as

• an apology for what is not working as smoothly as it could
• a request for you to continue sending us raw and honest feedback
• a promise that great and wonderful things are coming in time

It’s not possible for me to put a date on when these things will arrive because we prioritize fixing things and responding to customer problems as higher than building new features. But reBlogger is stabilizing very well – after all it’s almost 18 months old – and so we can begin to build new features more and more now. The next version (RB 4.0) will be simply stunning, a work of beauty.

The irony is that we don’t want too many customers right now because we need to keep coding rather than doing too much support. But sales would bring revenue and that would help us grow. But growing takes time. I think this is a problem all self-funded startups face, the chicken or the egg.

I hope this post has encouraged you to purchase RB as it is and stick with us as we grow.

Thanks,
Mark Wilson.

6 reasons why reBlogger will not be like Kiko

This post is our company reply to my own post: Bubble 2.0 begins to deflate – 9 lessons

Here are some reasons why reBlogger will not deflate with Bubble 2.0, but instead we will increase and grow:

1. We have more income than expenditure – we’re cash flow positive, without any investors (low risk approach)
2. Metcalfe’s Law is still valid and this alone tells me that reBlogger is the right product, at the right time: Metcalfe’s original insight was that the value of a communications network grows (exponentially, as it turns out) as the number of users grow because as the network grows, as participation grows (via RSS) the need for management inside companies grows too… and we’re the only product that offers to resolve this problem for large companies
3. The pricing is crucial – and our pricing is right. We have a free version, hobby, corporate and very large corporate versions.
4. We have great features but we’re not afraid to remove many of them. Some say that a movie is not finished being edited until the “favorite/protected/darling” scenes have been cut. Just today we agreed to remove central features from the default install, to make it an easier learning curve for initial users.
5. We have big dreams and a great vision, but we’re still focussing half our time on making what we have work better than before.
6. We have made a strategic decision to align with Microsoft and they reach the cashed-up corporate market where companies still have money to spend long after the Bubble 2.0 has gone under

I think that we must simply ignore the carnage that is about to happen and keep our minds focussed on creating the best product to monitor corporate blogs. The best place to watch internal blogs, track competitor’s blogs and keep up with the industry news – right there in your cubicle using reBlogger.

Bubble 2.0 begins to deflate – 9 lessons

Do you remember the way we used to be? Our lives untainted by memories. And we laughed and we cried and we…. yeah yeah yeah. You know the song.

Well it had to happen. Bubble 2.0 is starting to deflate. Just as the new economy resulted in effed company which tracked the fall from dizzy heights and good companies with good people became road kill… in the same way Bubble 2.0 has deadpool and the body count is rising.

Well, the inevitable is starting to happen – a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back. – Fold.com…Folds

Never a truer words has been spoken. Well, ok. Very seldom has… well yes… many truer words have been spoken. But still. This is a good word.

In our company we have been trying to focus on certain strategies and to avoid certain things for some time now. The acid test for me was not the hype, not the investment, not the long tail, not the ideas, not the talent, not the committment nor the features or buzz or excitement… it was the income.

You can’t take home and eat excitement. The proof of the pudding is still in the eating. Do people want to eat what you are offering… more specifically, will they pay for it? If someone doesn’t pay for it, you have NO business model.

Here are some really good posts about a recent startdown called Kiko:

• Kiko in the deadpool
• Actual lessons from Kiko 1
• Actual lessons from Kiko 2
  
• Kiko Flatlines

As Richard White, member of the Kiko team, wrote:

I agree with the 37signals argument that having paying customers forces you to hone in on what that market wants, and that probably would have done us a lot of good – Actual lessons from Kiko 2

As Justin Kan blogged about Kiko

Stay Focused. … snip… If you’re a creative person, it’s very easy to get side-tracked on side ideas when you really should be working on your main one. This is bad. Bad, bad, bad. We did this a lot with Kiko, and it caused many delays in getting the product out the door.

Cute hacks can cost you time. Take the time to do things right from the beginning. Seriously.
Build incrementally. We tried to build the ultimate AJAX calendar all at once. It took a long time. We could have done it piece by piece. Nuff said. – Actual lessons from Kiko 1

These simple pieces of advice can absolutely mean the difference between earning an income and just getting by and never actually being able to make a difference in the world. The cute hacks one still drives me absolutely nuts as I struggle with moving us forward while having to undo the junk legacy code that was written in the past.
Some other lessons worth considering

Too many features killed the cat – It didn’t look it at first, but if you played around with Kiko 1.0 for 15 minutes you found out that there was a *lot* of functionality under the hood. Problem was that we felt we needed to bring *all* of that functionality over to Kiko 2.0. I mean you can’t cut features between versions, right? Wrong. We should have cut features, probably about 40% of them and launched.

You must have a plan for escaping the Technosphere – To a degree, it didn’t matter how many posts we got on TechCrunch, LifeHacker or Scoble; we would still be stuck in the same Technosphere duking it out with Google, 30Boxes and everyone else. You can make a nice living just pimping your wares in the technosphere (which is what I’m attempting with SlimTimer) but if you ever want to gain any real traction as an online calendar service you have to target the cubicle dwellers and their Outlook calendars that only exist outside the sphere. Techie users are fickle, transient and demanding. You can spend all of your time implementing ATOM feeds and hCalendar export and never be the better for it. We didn’t have a plan for how to go mainstream, which, in hindsight, was a prerequisite for our success.

I would add one more thing: know when to stop. If you’ve been pouring money into something and it’s just not happening, not finishing, not there… its always “just” this or “only” that and if the issues keep shifting (even if it’s FOR A GOOD REASON) then you might need to swallow the loss of your investment and regain control of the direction of the company. We recently did this too.

So in summary:

1. Buidling the product /= gaining revenue from it.
2. Be cashflow positive. Earn more than you spend. Live within your means.
3. Work on the main idea, not on all the “great” (but peripheral) ideas
4. Do not hack in things badly, they will cost dearly you later
5. Build and release incrementally (3.1, 3.2, 3.3… 4.0)
6. Launch with the features that are complete, don’t forever delay the launch for “still to come” features
7. Business is where the money is, not the technosphere – have a plan to reach the cubicle dwellers in companies
8. Know when to stop going down a wrong path. Stop wasting money and accept the loss.
9. Find a way to charge for your product because this produces realism. If no one buys it… then no one is buying it, there is no future… you can then change products, diversify, cutback and try again. If they are buying, then keep on keeping on.

These are the strategies to keep out of the deadpool.

Kilo is currently for sale on eBay. 40,000 monthly visitors… being sold for $50k.

The reBlogger tech stack

reBlogger has been under development for over 18 months now. There is nothing else like it out there and we’re confident that it’s maturing into a very useful corporate product.

The growth so far

There have been many hurdles along the way, for example having to write very robust code to handle the non-conforming RSS feeds out there and the different versions.

Once we had built this robust engine, we moved “up the stack” to build our publishing engine, which publishes in a proven search engine optimized format.

Once we had that, we needed an administration system that only needed the very minimal attention (fire once and forget). Then we built an installer that works through ftp – making it the easiest possible.

After that it was finally time to look at the social services and the user-interface components – which is where we are busy now.

Our tech stack

Our tech stack looks a bit like this:

Still to come are the following “higher up” features in the “social” layer:

• Layout drag and drop gadgets (coming in the next version: 4.0!)
• A smarter way to find the web feeds you’re looking for
• More powerful reports showing relative activity of keywords
• World-first social features
• More targetted product differentiation with adapted functionality to suit your exact needs

Hosted application and partnership

We are keen to establish a hosted application, but to do that we’re looking for a partner who can provide the servers etc. If you’re interested please contact me markwilson at topxml.com

Steps to testing out a corporate reBlogger

5 simple steps to trying out your own reBlogger:

1. Download the reBlogger 30 day trial zip. In the zip is a readme.txt that explains how to install it to your website via ftp
2. Add up to 5 web feeds of any type for free
3. Add your search terms to look for; and the keyword/headings to publish the content under
4. Run “Get blog posts!” to collect the web feeds and filter them
5. View the results

reBlogger is especially useful for the following situations:

1. Finding banned words or pre-release information in corporate blogs
2. Collecting the industry news on a daily basis
3. Collecting competitor’s blog posts for research
4. Raising alerts for keyword activity in the general blogger population

Enjoy!

Free Ajax Microsoft Atlas (Ajax) Lab

We’re pleased to announce our free Microsoft Atlas (Ajax) Lab in which we provide free .NET source code to explain how to use Microsoft Atlas. The following blogs should be read in conjunction with the code above:

• coding reblogger
• coding atlas

We hope this is productive and useful for you.

Launch of new website and new pricing

Yesterday we launched the new look and feel of our reBlogger website and our new pricing structure.

5 new versions

We also have 5 versions of reBlogger: one to meet every need.

We are particularly excited about the introduction of the Corporate and the Research versions!

Personal Use

This is the free edition for small scale personal use.

Hobby Website

Do you run a small hobby website where you want to collect the news feeds from around the web and publish them to your Windows website? This is the version for you.

Small business

If your business has a small number of blogs to publish to your website, this version of reBlogger is ideal for you.

Corporate Blog Manager

For a company that has hundreds of bloggers, this version of reBlogger will track the blog posts, filter them and notify the managers when a blog post has swearing in it or discusses pre-release information. This version of reBlogger manages the content for the manager, so you don’t have to.

Market Research

This version is typically used to track competitors employee blogs and to research trends and explore market positioning. The so called “social” features of reBlogger enable an internal corporate discussion to slice and dice the blog posts of the competing employees.

Blogging is not just a new wave, we think of it more as a tidal wave which will redesign corporate communications. We’re riding the leading edge of that wave.

We have recently decided on new innovations (like a free Ajax/Atlas Lab) and an improved direction for the company, so be prepared to see still more change and innovations from us.

Check out out reBlogger website and let me know what you think.

17 Pithy Insights For Startup Founders

17 Pithy Insights For Startup Founders. Well worth reading… along with the other similar posts I’ve collected in this blog.

reBlogger 4.0 is on it’s way!

We’ve launched the reBlogger.com website and development continues on the reBlogger 4.0 version (although we shipped 3.31 fix and we will shortly ship 3.4 as a small feature enhancement).

Every previous major (RB 1.x, 2.x, 3.x) version has been a quantum leap forward. RB 4.0 is no exception. Our per-version feature enhancement list can be found here.

The goals for RB 4 are:

• Simplify the customization of reBlogger for administrators
• Improve search/filter engine
• Improve and ease certain administrative tasks
• Add social context to reBlogger

Look and feel

The look and feel of reBlogger 4.0 is totally revamped and is entirely configurable through the new gadgets feature! Put ANY gadget ANYWHERE on the page and design it in a visual editor.

This is what reBlogger could look like on your website. Click on the thumbnails to view the larger images.

Now it’s totally customizable. You do not need any knowledge of Atlas/Ajax or HTML. You simply drag and drop the gadgets right there… in the page!

Coding Microsoft Atlas blog

Meanwhile our Microsoft Altas coding blog is picking up serious steam as we explain how to use Microsoft Atlas – something that appears to be a mystery to almost everyone.

• Using Atlas:AutoCompleteExtender to simplfy browsing large lists
• Use UpdatePanel controls to quickly ajaxify your existing Asp.NET code
• Darken the page and set focus on the user input
• Getting a DataTable from server and working with it in Javascript (VB.NET)

Coding reBlogger blog

And we’re also putting effort into describing the next version of reBlogger on our coding reBlogger blog.

• Adding yet more templates…
• reBlogger 4 – two additional themes
• reBlogger 4 – introducing themes
• reBlogger 4 – goals

So although this reBlogger blog has been quiet for a while, we haven’t been. We’re beavering away at making a better reBlogger.

Partnership

If there is a company reading this who is interested in partnering with us to create a free online social version, I’d like to talk to you. We don’t have the $ to buy the hardware to set the service up, but we certainly can provide the code to do it.

Contact us if you’re interested in sharing the potential advertising revenue of such an adventure. (markwilson at topxml dot com)

Google Checkout

Ai caramba! Didn’t MS try this a few years ago… passport?

Everything 2.0

Just when you thought 2.0 had been buried… Everything 2.0 and they don’t have reBlogger! Scandalous!

The Spot 4 Oracle

Sick of collecting hundreds of web feeds to cover all the Oracle blogs? Now get all your Oracle news and blog posts in one place: theSpot4Oracle.

It's built with reBlogger. 

What will you do with your reBlogger?

reBlogger 4.0

Ivan has posted about the status of reBlogger 4.0

DRM in RSS 2, OPML 2 and ATOM 1

DRM, Digital Rights Management

DRM handles the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading, monitoring and enforcement of the usage restrictions that accompany a specific instance of a digital work.

Any blog post is a "digital work" and as a creator of aggregation software, the rights of the author is important to me. But I'll go beyond that and say that I want authors to earn from their work and I want our software to handle that for them. I'll go even further beyond that and say that our software can encourage and enforce correct usage restrictions too.

To what extent do the existing web feed specs make provision for DRM? Or… to put it another way, if our software was to implement DRM on behalf of the authors, which spec has the features we need and which ones don't?

I've posted about the need for extensions to RSS in order to safeguard the content creators rights. As a creator of an aggregation product, I think it's very a important topic. Here are some of my posts that contain practical suggestions:

• Blog content ownership and control February 8, 2006
• Why Google is extending RSS April 19, 2006
• Blog revenue sharing – paying the content creator May 2, 2006

Although these posts are not in the same focus area (rights protection) as my own posts, I've found quite a few comments about the limitations of RSS and the inability to influence the "owners" of the spec who will take charge in dealing with the changes that are needed. Here are some of the posts I have found:

• The feed validator is dead to me April 15th, 2006
• RSS feeds: valid, useful or accurate April 16, 2006
• Conventional RSS April 21, 2006

Clearly we need some changes, otherwise companies (Microsoft?) and people will just begin to implement their own changes as they see fit, on behalf of their customers. Another wild west scenario.

OPML

Dave might be onto some of the things I am looking for:

I'm leading a lunch discussion today about Identity in RSS and OPML, particularly OPML 2.0, which has a element for the author's identity. It's specified in 2.0 as a URL, and should plug into the work being done in this community.

The OPML 2.0 spec has some really useful information in the <HEAD> area.

<dateCreated> is a date-time, indicating when the document was created.
<dateModified> is a date-time, indicating when the document was last modified.
<ownerName> is a string, the owner of the document.
<ownerEmail> is a string, the email address of the owner of the document.
<ownerId> is the http address of a web page that contains an HTML a form that allows a human reader to communicate with the author of the document via email or other means.

Dave is clearly interested in taking the long view by including this element:

<docs> is the http address of documentation for the format used in the OPML file. It's probably a pointer to this page for people who might stumble across the file on a web server 25 years from now and wonder what it is.

But OPML is not designed to contain content, but rather to link to content – and perhaps to link to the content which is linked to by that content (recursively). It's very good and useful at that. OPML is not what I'm looking for.

RSS

The RSS 2.0 spec contains only 1 author related element and it's an email address:

An item's author element provides the e-mail address of the person who wrote the item (optional).

I don't think it's sufficient because email addresses change over time. So RSS would not provide enough information for the protection of the rights of the author.

ATOM

The W3C Atom format spec (not Atom 0.3) has far more useful information than either RSS or OPML in terms of tracking the lifetime of the "item" (content) and in always being able to find the original author. Atom even hasa "rights" element. No wonder entire sites are converting to ATOM.

The "atom:author" element is a Person construct that indicates the author of the entry or feed.

The "atom:contributor" element is a Person construct that indicates a person or other entity who contributed to the entry or feed.

The "atom:id" element conveys a permanent, universally unique identifier for an entry or feed.

The "atom:published" element is a Date construct indicating an instant in time associated with an event early in the life cycle of the entry.

The "atom:updated" element is a Date construct indicating the most recent instant in time when an entry or feed was modified in a way the publisher considers significant. Therefore, not all modifications necessarily result in a changed atom:updated value.

The "atom:rights" element is a Text construct that conveys information about rights held in and over an entry or feed.

I really like the foresight of this next element!

If an atom:entry element does not contain an atom:rights element, then the atom:rights element of the containing atom:feed element, if present, is considered to apply to the entry.

Atom does a far better job of giving the elements that can be used to protect the authors of the content. In the two specs above the main author element which is intended to contain an email. But email addresses change over time – and in this way an author could lose touch with the ways in which their content is being used.

Atom uses this word "person" throughout ther spec. What is a "person" in Atom?

A Person construct is an element that describes a person, corporation, or similar entity (hereafter, 'person'). This specification assigns no significance to the order of appearance of the child elements in a Person construct. Person constructs allow extension Metadata elements.

The "atom:name" element's content conveys a human-readable name for the person. The content of atom:name is Language-Sensitive.

The "atom:uri" element's content conveys an IRI associated with the person. Person constructs MAY contain an atom:uri element, but MUST NOT contain more than one.

The "atom:email" element's content conveys an e-mail address associated with the person. Person constructs MAY contain an atom:email element, but MUST NOT contain more than one.

Overall I can imagine Atom providing us with enough elements to be able to implement some form of protection for the rights of the initial author.

What is the issue here?

If we don't take action now, we will have a situation where people earn off content in the same way as people earn from paintings. If I paint a wonder piece of art, I sell it – and that's the end of my revenue. The artwork can be resold 20 times and increase in value 100 times… but I make nothing. Speculators make everything, I get nothing.

Without protecting the author and providing them with income, we really cannot expect to see the emergence of professional authors who create great content over the long term.

Specs

Here are links to the specs:

• RSS 2.0 spec
• W3C Atom format spec
• Atom 0.3 format spec
• OPML 2.0 spec

This is an important issue to me because we're building the reBlogger website based aggregator and I want to honor the digital rights of the author… but I can't programmatically determine what their rights are!

reBlogger past, present and future

Yesterday I completed our first interview about reBlogger with Robin Good. It will be published next week on his excellent site.

I had great fun doing it – a lot more fun than I expected. I've realized that I (and our team) are very passionate about what we're doing.

In essence I sketched out the existing reBlogger 3.x and the forthcoming Next Gen version and the corporate version after that. I'll share the extremely short version here. (I look forward to reading Robin's take on our discussion)

Background to reBlogger: We began to build reBlogger almost 2 years ago for our own internal needs on TopXML. It was about a year ago that we made some copies of reBlogger available to other websites that we have close relationships with. By the end of last year reBlogger was in it's 3rd version and we had moved it to .NET because of the massive increase in development productivity over Classic ASP. As I travelled in Europe at the end of last year I was in beautiful Venice (Italy) and I read Robin's website (also in Italy). Robin wrote passionately about newsmastering. Amongst other things he wrote:

We need something of an entirely new order of magnitude to manage all of this information.

Search engines, open directories, and millions of bloggers are not enough.

We need a multi-layered, self-organizing approach that allows the load to be highly distributed and the focus and depth to be guaranteed by the combined result of many highly focused individual efforts.

As I travelled around Venice along the grand canal (and went to a wonderful masked opera), I began to see a much larger picture of what our existing reBlogger can be used for. I saw that we could provide the answer that Robin had been looking for.

I bought newsmasters.com for a small fortune and ever since we've been gradually building reBlogger into something that will help people and companies manage the torrent of data that is flowing past them – in Octber 2005 it was called a river of news but these days it's a tidal wave of news.

reBlogger 3.x is predominantly designed for SEO companies and websites that want to track blog content in tightly grouped themes. This product is described in this post covering the "reBlogger engine" and you can view many existing websites that are built our of reBlogger 3.x One of the great things is that right out of the box reBlogger gives you excellent ranking in search engines because of it's focus on creating themes. In this way reBlogger 3.x is similar to a content manager (CM).

reBlogger Next Gen is designed for building meme or web 2.0 websites. It's an engine with a far higher level of functionality than reBlogger 3.x. It's basically DIGG-in-a-box. With the mushrooming number of 2.0 sites out there (all containing voting and Ajax coolness) there is a big need for standardization and componentization. Atlas brings that at a technology level, but we're making DIGG sites (meme, web 2.0) into a commodity that anyone can buy. By using our reBlogger Next Gen you can easily have a DIGG site working on your website. It's got all the functionality of reBlogger 3.x plus all the existing Ajax goodies that most 2.0 existing sites have – and then some extra innovations that have not been seen yet on the web, for example Hover Comments.

reBlogger corporate version is designed for… corporates. When you have 1,000 bloggers in your company, you have major headache looming. How do you track the bloggers? When you can get the blog posts of your competitors employees you have a major opportunity! What can you extract from their blogs? Sales departments want to track buzz about a product, is it increasing or declining? Marketing departments may want to generate buzz about upcoming products and compare that graphically to buzz about upcoming competitor products (think XBox 360 and PS3).

We think the enormous volume of blog content is a whole new addition to the lives of people who are connected via the internet. Everyone wants to track something of interest to them. Everyone naturally has a desire to play and explore. We have the long term vision to enable it.

The reBlogger engine

I think that what we see in the next version of Windows – the RSS platform – is just one layer in a typical "feed stack" or "RSS Stack". I call it a stack because there are different things happening at higher and higher layers of abstraction above the previous layer, rather like a protocol stack where the lowest stack can be Ethernet > IP > TCP > HTTP.

Ivan mentioned that he is building the next generation reBlogger over the existing engine. In that post look for the words: "No changing original reBlogger code".

In the existing reBlogger 3.x engine, we have a stack of sorts – each layer has a greater level of functionality that depends on the previous layer:

1. Find, track and manage feeds (all versions of RSS, ATOM, RDF etc.)
2. Manage types of resources differently (podcasting, blogging, flikr images)
3. Aggregate the content intelligently (collate/merge a bunch of feeds together – like the engine in Windows RSS Platform does)
4. Mixing (combining posts into a single feed, from across different sources)
5. Filering (to remove off topic posts, adverts, Google bad neighbourhoods and profanity)
6. pre-Publishing (only publish newest items, avoid duplicates)
7. SEO-friendly publishing (create highly optimized content on your own website)
8. SEO-friendly site navigation (insert highly optimized navigation structure including URLList and Sitemaps)
9. Automation (do all of the above automatically with no administrator involvement)
10. Extensive administrator tools
11. Allow customization of the look and feel

Now in the next generation reBlogger we will be adding significantly to this engine. In fact rather than replace it, we will simply add over what is already there.

How to: roll your own reBlogger

Let's say you run a website about sports. Do you want to collect blog posts on various sporting topics? What do you do if you can't afford reBlogger ($500)?

You can roll your own reBlogger for free! Yes! You can build a subject collection on your own website or intranet in a few manual steps:

1. Find a bunch of feeds you want to track
2. Use RSS Mix or Feed Digest or Feed Blendr or Feed Shake to collate/merge a bunch of feeds together
3. Use Feed Rinse or ZapTXT to remove the rude words and exclude off topic posts
4. Use an RSS Parser (choose from list 1 or list 2) to extract posts based on keywords or topics
5. Use RSS Cache to keep a track of which items you previously posted to your website and only let you have the newest items (no duplicates)
6. Use Feed Digest (or RSS to JS converter) to get the feeds transferred onto your website
7. Automate some scripts to insert forward/backward navigation into the new pages (indexes, categories)
8. Mashup (automate) all of that hourly

Or… simply buy reBlogger and get all of that integrated into one suite… with great administrator features!

Overnight in the blogosphere

I took a quick look through my SEO reBlogger as it collects, sorts and indexes SEO/blogosphere related posts. I found some interesting items.

Google Bans Digg.com – Woooah!! 😳

New Google Pagerank Patent – I guess the pagerank isn't dead after all? 💡

Blog Metrics API 2.0 Released!

All This From a PR Firm in NY? – "We've opened the Connors Communications MyLongTail data to the world."

8 Ways to Submit Your Site to Yahoo

Tectonic shift in the blogosphere – Google’s identity services

Now this is interesting. Google authorized websites, Lighthouse? and Google's X-GOOGLE-TOKEN. I won't repeat the text here – just go read it. I think we're seeing a tectonic shift in the blogosphere and Google are placing themselves right at the center of it simply by handing out freebies and services to anyone who needs them.

I'm still unsure how long the money from advertising and from their IPO can last for. When Microsoft's AdCenter kicks in and the IPO money runs out what will Google do for income? Google has diversified into many businesses but few or none of them (free spreadsheets, free identity services, free everything) earn money. Then again, they made BILLIONS in the IPO and they make BILLIONS in ad revenue, so that date when the economics of the situation force a rationalisation of the business may be a long way off.

As Robert Soble said in Google announces more sleepless nights ahead for MSFT product managers

You're watching two massively different ideas about how computers should be used battling it out right on the world's economic stage. On one hand you have the old standard Office that says "load locally and use local resources." On the other hand you have the new, fresh and clean, Google Office that says "load on the server and use a thin client, er browser."

I think Microsoft is far too paranoid, far too experienced, far too determined and has far too many brilliantly smart employees to make the same mistake that IBM did when they ignored Microsoft. Microsoft won't get left behind. They might be a battleship, but as someone said when they got hired by Microsoft – he said something like "from they outside they look like a battleship, but on the inside they are thousands of speed boats, which is why they can turn so easily."

As the old chinese proverb says: May you live in interesting times. Or maybe this proverb is more applicable: It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period. hehehe.

Network neutrality D-Day tomorrow

You might have read my post Web inventor warns of ‘dark’ net previously in which Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns of the dangers of the web getting "gatekeepers". It's an important post and it points to this BBC article Web inventor warns of 'dark' net as the source.

Robert Scoble has blogged Key network neutrality bill up for vote tomorrow

We're expecting the U.S. House of Representitives will vote on the Markey-Boucher-Eschoo-Inslee network neutrality amendment tomorrow or Thursday. I strongly support this amendment. It is gonna really be nasty if bandwidth companies can block or charge different rates to different internet players.

This is an important issue. The ramifications are significant.

Office 2.0 + Google Spreadsheets = Query(trouble(MS Office))

I've blogged bout a lot of different Office 2.0 solutions. Some of them had spreadsheets like Zoho sheets. But now entering stage from left: Google Spreadsheets. This came sooner than I expected! Techmeme. CNET.

Robert Scoble says: Google announces more sleepless nights ahead for MSFT product managers

It's a good thing because of my philosophy. I want better software. Competition brings better software. It gets product managers to worry about customers. It causes discussions of features that were long-ago decided on.

You're watching two massively different ideas about how computers should be used battling it out right on the world's economic stage. On one hand you have the old standard Office that says "load locally and use local resources." On the other hand you have the new, fresh and clean, Google Office that says "load on the server and use a thin client, er browser."

I know which one I'm betting on. Why? Perspective. Even with my always-on-$80-a-month Verizon card getting to Network resources is still far slower than pulling them off of the hard drive. And, that'll remain true for a long time. Also, the Web browser simply doesn't have the API support to do really rich stuff.

Most interesting. I strongly recommend you read the rest of his post. He goes on to say that Ajax (DHTML) will run out of legs as people demand more features in the online version.

Don Dodge says that Google's online Office software really just competes with OpenOffice and not with MS Office.

So, while the headlines may scream Google Spreadsheets is competing with Microsoft Office, the more accurate statement is that Google is competing with OpenOffice. Remember, free and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office have been around for a long time. They serve a different segment of the market. Google is competing with Open Source and going after that market.

He wishes! This is a head-on-head battle. As Microsoft comes after Google's strength (search and AdSense/AdWords) Google is going after one of the cash cows which bring in something like 28% of the Microsoft revenue.

Is Tom Skerritt the new Clippy 2.0?

Regular readers will know that I like to chew apart Social website UI's and any other website UI that I think is doing things better or differently.

I am looking at this site See Windows Vista and I am amazed by the use of technology, the UI design and the usability. It's remarkable. I doubt Vista will be THAT good… will it? But the site itself is remarkable I think. Stuff slides around, it's so… so… usable.

Having said that, I don't think this new Clippy 2.0 (Tom Skerritt) can avoid the same fate of the old clippy. hehehe. I mean, that's what he is right? He guides you around, he hassles you, he tries to be chirpy and interactive. If you do nothing for a while he even walks up to your "screen" and knocks on it to get your attention. (I took the screenshot as he knocks on my screen.)

So what do I think of this UI? I think this UI is not at all suited to the emerging social interface (I mean, how do you shoe-horn "social" into this UI?) So while it's fantastically attractive, it's basically a much more attractive web-based brochure. A better mousetrap… hmmm… that's not necessarily a bad thing!

MyLongTail

There has been a lot of chatter about the "long tail" in the web industry as a new business model. Now there is a site to help you build a long tail! It's called MyLongTail (blog).

They have some very interesting graphics to explain what they do (explaining concepts like this is not easy to do)

Their business cycle graphic "works" quite well to explain how things can work.

PR 2.0

Holy cow. Did you know there is a "PR 2.0"? I just added it as a keyword to SEOData's reBlogger in the Web 2.0 section.

Clock 2.0?

So funny! "Kind of like a game of hide-and-seek". Muhahaha!

Clocky™ (patent pending) is an alarm clock that runs away and hides if you don’t get out of bed on time. The alarm sounds, you press the snooze, and Clocky will roll off of the bedside table, fall to the floor, and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects until he finds a spot to rest. When the alarm sounds again, you must awaken to search for him. Clocky will find new spots everyday, kind of like a hide-and-seek game.

Clocky via Venture Chronicles via Joshua Schachter via Om

A quick list of links that reBlogger caught overnight

I went to reBlogger on SEOData to catch up on the SEO news. It collects 157 SEO and blog (wiki etc.) related web feeds.

I wasn't happy with the existing keywords and so I added a Web 2.0 section and a Blogosphere, social, meme section with a bunch of keywords including "Blogosphere, Structured Blogging, Microcontent, Technorati, Bloglines, Social software, DIGG, Syndication ".

So now it pretty much catches all the posts I'm interested in. Here's the cream of the posts from overnight:

• information aesthetics – an impressive set of data visualizations that explore the del.icio.us collaborative bookmarking network (great posts – what an absolutely brilliant blog/site!)
  

• A Must Have SEO Tool to check out – Just started using this brand spanking new SEO tool called MyLongTail and I am already addicted to it.
• Five Techniques for Using Web 2.0 to Reinvent the Customer Relationship
• Auto folksonomy for the blogosphere
• What qualifies as a folksonomy?
• If you're interested in "Enterprise 2.0" then I highly recommend The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on Businesses and their Leaders as a source of thoughtful insight.
• Reputation Management – Case Study, Part I – The goal of my reputation management experiment was to try and come as close to the ‘perfect serp’ for a particular company’s listing. My plan was to use external websites that allow free content, press releases, and possibly some internal subdomains if necessary (see Tips for Controlling the Top 10 for more details).

Enjoy!

Sentence level annotation is coming!

Well… it had to happen. What we invented for a future version of reBlogger is already appearing here Unobtrusive Sidenotes and you can see the example here. They use CSS to achieve the effect of adding comments to the existing page. Niffty.

Now I've run into this crowd: Diigo : social bookmarks and annotations

Don't just bookmark! Highlight important paragraphs and put up digital sticky notes anywhere you wish in the whole wide web. Easily find what is important and why you saved it in the first place!

With a virtual highlighter and digital sticky notes, now you can highlight & jot down your comments directly on any part of a webpage and scan through all your research findings quickly. Easily extract and compile all your highlights across multiple pages for a given subject.Keep your annotations private or share with others. Exchange viewpoints on any specific area of a webpage – great for collaboration or debating an issue.

It's remarkable how quickly you can get an idea and find that others are doing the same thing. I am constantly amazed at this. Other people have productized this before us, so it will be interesting to see what happens now. Perhaps we'll launch what we have and throw it open to people to play with. I've got a bunch of blog posts pre-loaded from a while back which will give a good run down of the idea. It's really quite revolutionary.

They made it public first, but I think what we have in mind is not only better, but far more useful. Natch! 😀

Pheed Read #3

Pheed Read #3 – RSS Feeds Provide Untapped Advertising Audience

"Pheed Read" is released quarterly by Pheedo and details trends in RSS usage. This new one (only available in PDF – doh!) is not terribly good.

But don't miss the previous two Pheed Reads which are superb and useful:

• "Pheed Read" No. 1 – report on the state of RSS advertising
• Pheed Read #2 – Standalone RSS Ads Perform, Ad-to-Post Ratios Clarified

Enjoy!