Interesting posts from around the web

Every now and then I read through SEOData's reBlogger and pick out the titles and posts I think you might find interesting and post them here. This is one of those dayss.

• Ad Quality - Google AdWords is improving
• Complore : social research portal - Basically it is a place to keep all your bookmarks, but not only that, since it is based on a research model, there is also space for different document types like, articles, papers, events (create an event), and lectures…and these don’t have to have a URL, there is some storage space to upload files.
• KM2.0 newmastering - ITToolbox is the type of km2.0 tool that I think we will see in popping up more frequently. It is basically a newsmatering tool for external news, articles, papers, as well as a collaborative tool for internal news, such as blogging, forums, wiki’s, etc…
• Google Sitemaps Catch 22 - Apparently, in order to submit a reinclusion request, one has to acknowledge violating Google’s quality guidelines, even if they do not believe they did so.

Enjoy!

New reBlogger.com site is almost ready

We're readying our flagship website for reBlogger. But it's not the hosted site yet… sorry Al. It is the site where you can download the 30 day demo of reBlogger (see the release notes and features) and play with it on your own site. Until now reBlogger has been living off space on other sites, but now it will have a home all of it's own.

I've seen the pre-release of the site and it's waaaay cool. Ivan has used Ajax (Microsoft Atlas) very intelligently, for example he has an Atlas slide show so you can explore reBlogger! The site is very attractive and very interactive for visitors.

After this launch we'll issue another version of reBlogger (3.4 probably) and then we'll focus on the hosted site version.

To all the paparazzi… warm up your pens and pencils… here she comes!

Web inventor warns of ‘dark’ net

So… just as wikipedia gets "gatekeepers" (and loses it's uber-social status), Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns of the dangers of the web getting "gatekeepers"!

Web inventor warns of 'dark' net 

The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said. Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh. He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period".

… snip…

This is based on the concept of network neutrality, where everyone has the same level of access to the web and that all data moving around the web is treated equally. This view is backed by companies like Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to be introduced to guarantee net neutrality. The first steps towards this were taken last week when members of the US House of Representatives introduced a net neutrality bill.

Yay for Microsoft and Google for defending the masses. Now… can they also restore Wikipedia to it's former glory?

The death of Wikipedia

On the 24th of May this appeared on roughttype.com and it caused a stirr…

The death of Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise. There was a time when, indeed, pretty much anyone could edit pretty much anything on Wikipedia. But, as eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols recently observed, "Wikipedia hasn't been a real 'wiki' where anyone can write and edit for quite a while now."

And the next day this appeared on the same site…

Now, let's bury the myth

I bought into the myth myself, I'm ashamed to say. In composing my requiem for Wikipedia yesterday, I originally wrote, "There was a time when, indeed, anyone could edit anything on Wikipedia." No, it turns out, there was never such a time. It was a myth from the very start. But "openness" is only the very tip of the mythical iceberg that Wikipedia has become. The bigger myth is that Wikipedia is an emanation of collective intelligence or, in the popular phrase, the "wisdom of the crowd." In this view, Wikipedia has a compeletely flat, non-hierarchical structure. It is a purely egalitarian collective without any bureaucracy or even any management. There's no authority.

Do you remember the dotcom boom? Remember the dotcom bust that some people didn't wanted to believe would inevitably happen? I can still remember Bill O'Reilly ranting that it's the new economy and that Greenspan is messing it up. Muhahahaha. I wonder if he still thinks that or has reality sunk in?

In the same way that some people wondered if there is a new economy and the old rules are done away with… in that same way how many of us thought wikipedia was the advent of truly social software - where the wisdom of the masses finally hit it's stride and conquered old media?

But… if wikipedia is a sham… then perhaps it's not something new, it's the same old same old. That would explain why old media News Corp owns so much of the new media as well. Is it business as usual?

Ah well… it was fun while it lasted eh?

Syndication but not republishing… what’s the solution?

Dave Winer says:

My feed is copyrighted, so they need my permission to republish it, and they don’t have it.

Well… the irony is rich on the ground. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. By it's nature it's main use is for syndication.

I can see how syndication is not necessarily republishing. To create automated services that republish, we need to have copyright built into the format. With over 40 million feeds out there it's just not possible for Technorati and bloglines to email each owner (including Dave Winer) and ask permission. So the most common solution is "opt-out" which Dave Rejects. 

I don’t think their offer of an opt-out is very convincing.

That's why I've been blogging about DRM being defined in the ATOM and RSS specs, so that the author can specify his/her expectations of how the content will be used during the entire lifetime of it's use. Have a read of my post: DRM in RSS 2, OPML 2 and ATOM 1

We really do need to resolve this problem.

Boxxet

Ok, now on to Boxxet.

The site is not public (it's by invitation only at this stage) so I can't review their UI.

I can only guess at their functionality content by reading the various reviews.

What I found out is that you can't (yet) create a personal boxxet, you can only create publically editable boxxets. As a result those boxxets then improve and continue to improve as many people work on the same ones over time. So this makes boxxet like a wiki, because I can improve any wiki page. I really like this!

Boxxet: Wants to be the About.com of Web 2.0

[Update: Once a user creates a boxxet, other users (who registered with an email address) can go in and rank the content there, i.e, whether they like or dislike it, and the system will respond by emphasizing or de-emphasizing that content in the ranking order. If enough people vote an item down, the content will go away.]

Review 1. Review 2.

You can sumbit books, blog postings, bookmarks, RSS feeds, gear, photos, movies, bars, hotels and restaurants. I do find the latter 3 quite strange. One thing, which I find quite sad, is how the site doesn’t have any tagging. You can, however, comment or review any submission. Also, for blog postings you can click ‘like’ or ‘dislike’, fi you choose dislike you have to say why, and this effects a score.

Review 3.

Boxxet functions like a typical Web search tool. Type a term or phrase and it produces links to existing social networks created by Boxxet users that mention the term. The results are culled from blogs, news sites, photo sites, and lists of bookmarks that people choose to make public.

PersonalBee & Squidoo (fight! fight! fight!)

I first wrote about thepersonalbee (blog) in this post: Tracking memes… and our world views

I went back for a visit today. Hmmm… it's relaxing.

I really like the simple interface. Not to ajaxified, not to techy. The left hand column "popular public bees" is so simple and inviting. (I didn't immediately see that this was a scrollable region though).

Look at the simplicity of their message:

DISCOVER the news you care about.

SHARE the news with friends, family or colleagues.

BUILD your own news website or add news to your own blog or site.

So simple. I looked at some of the Bees and chose to view the Iraq one. Check out the 4 views. The search panel is well placed to the right hand side.

I ventured over to Squidoo to find their lens for "Iraq war" and searched for it. Their search engine suggested the tag "iraqwar" so I took that, and it told me "Congratulations you're the first to search for this term" and then offered to build a lens for it. Wow. No lens for the tag iraqwar that YOU suggested? Anyway, I persisted and searched for the "best lense" about Iraq.

Do yourself a favor and compare these two pages that are covering the same topic: Squidoo Iraq and Personal Bee Iraq

Alexaholic doesn't agree with me though. I wondered why Personalbee isn't doing better. I went to their blog. I found the following:

• The UI that I like is brand new. I am convinced it will work well for them!
• It seems that the Bee creation process was far complicated - they eventually needed a help file online and are now making a Bee creation wizard

How does Personalbee make money (from Siliconbeat)?

How does it make money? The Personal Bee writes a cookie to your browser, which sees the news that you are reading. The cookie is operated by a third-party company, called Revenue Science, which collects information about you from other sites you travel too. All this information helps Revenue Science serve up ads to other publishers — ads that are specific to what the system perceives your interests are. (ABC News, ESPN, Financial Times, Newsweek all serve the same Revenue Science cookie, so Personal Bee is not exceptional here).

Revenue Science serves up ads on other Web sites that you surf, but not on Personal Bee, which has decided not to run ads.

Interesting!

Another good review on it.

Let me give you my three favorite reasons to like Personal Bee:

1. I choose who’s important. I can calibrate Personal Bee to let me choose what RSS feeds are important to me on any particular topic.
2. Time relevance. Personal Bee  places a three-day time frame around an event.
3. Phrase Clouds replace Tag Clouds.

1% of site visitors create content, 10% synthesizes it

In terms of our company, this might be one of the most important posts. The summary at the end I hope will drive home the 3 different focusses we must have.

Here are two great posts:

The 1% Rule: Charting citizen participation

in June 2005 Wikipedia had a total of 68,682 total contributors. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is reported to have told a library group that month:

• 50% of all Wikipedia edits are done by 0.7% of users
• 1.8% of users have written more than 72% of all articles

If we also add evidence from Bradley Horowitz that roughly 1% of Yahoo's user population starts a Yahoo Group, we seem to have The 1% Rule: Roughly 1% of your site visitors will create content within a democratized community. (Horowitz also says that some 10% of the total audience "synthesizes" the content, or interacts with it.)

Are you a 1 Percenter?

The overriding lesson: Avoid marginalizing the 1 Percenters as statistically insignificant, unrepresentative of the total audience or simply the lunatic fringe. If anything, the 1 Percenters may represent the leading indicators of how well your brand is being adopted, synthesized and vocalized.

This post Are you a 1 Percenter? does a fabulous job of summarizing all the responses and input from other posts around the web. No need to re-create that here, just go there.

The part that says 10% of your site visitors synthesize the content is something I've been driving at for a while. Our software needs to accomodate three types of visitors:

1. The writer
2. The synthesizer (editor, masher, cross-linker)
3. The reader

Each type of visitor has a very different kind of perspective, attitude, expectation and need.

Bubble 2.0: Facebook turns down $750 mill

Not sure we're in a bubble? This social site Facebook is for sale and turned down a $750 million offer. Om reckons they should have sold. Techcrunch points out Skype got $4.1B and MySpace got $500 Million. Check out the Visitors statistics of US social networking sites and  here are their Alexa rankings.

— from gapingvoid

Bubble 2.0: Squidoo, hosted solutions etc.

I've written about Squidoo in the past. They are the closest thing we have to a competitor to reBlogger. Here is an interesting post from TechCrunch that says Squidoo won't survive the crunch: Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross? In reply, here is a must read: Squidoo and Tech Crunch: Wisdom from the mud pit of arrogance

What am I focussing on this? I think it's very important to have perspective that there can be the best APIs and mashups and Ajax use, but what is really needed to survive… is… revenue. Duh.

Over the long term Squidoo might show that they have a good business model and they will survive. We must have one.

Bubble 2.0 - how to stay focussed

We know this is a bubble (Bubble 2.0) and there will be a shakeout. There always is. 95% of the 2.0 websites and companies will blow $millions and never even break even. Some won't even earn advertising revenues. The ones left standing will survive.

Because of this reality, we have to maintain discipline. We have:

• a clear business model
• clear revenue source(s)
• a clear date at which we will look at how we're going - in terms of achieving revenue goals. If it's not happening we have to ask "why not?!" Are there too many free players in the market?

Ajax, 2.0, Mashups, APIs… it's exciting to think about all these cool technologies but it's also dangerous. We can get distracted from what really matters: our product called reBlogger.

Here's what matters:

• We're not trying to be all things to all people. We fetch web feeds, merge and extract useful information for the user and display it back to the user.
  
• We use Ajax (Microsoft Atlas) but we know it only adds to our actual product offering, ajax is not the product. Let me repeat, no matter how cool a PPT presentation was and how excited it made you feel, it was not the product… you still had to build a product.
• We're not just an online RSS reader, we do a lot more than that. No one else does what we do. Not even close.
• We might include some API/mashup items (like flikr) but it's an extra, it's not core to our product - and we know the difference

We need to stay focussed on the product and on earning revenue, not on the bubble nor on the UI tricks. Writely gained thousands of users by word of mouth. That is the most sincere form of flattery - that someone tells someone else about your product.

Bubble 2.0

I just renamed a category (tag) from "Doing Business on the Web" to "Bubble 2.0" because I think we need to be realistic about what is happening on the web right now.

Bubble 2.0

Money is being made all over the Internet these days. Some of it by good old fashioned revenues and cash flow. That's the foundation for the recovery in Internet investing we've been enjoying for the past couple years. But increasingly money is being made the way we made it from 1998 to early 2000; mometum investing, speculation, fast money chasing deals, caution being thrown to the wind, and amateurs jumping in on the action.

Built To Be Bought (Bubble 2.0)

So why am I now getting this increasingly uneasy feeling? I was chatting with a veteran of Bubble 1.0 recently and I think he hit on the thing that makes those of us who've seen this movie before most nervous. He pointed out that there are a large number of "companies" being created again for the express purpose of being acquired.

I've been blogging on the various DIGG clones and different open source business models and 2.0 UIs and Ajax techs… but what remains is to develop a working business model.

Once someone told me a piece of advice and it goes like this: fish where the fish are. To survive a company needs to fish where there are paying customers (unless your business model is to be bought out). Where are the fish biting? Where are the fish that will pay money? I may have massacred the analogy, but you get my point.

In my opinion the consumer market is so full of free software and free hosted services run by advertising, the only place to find fish that still bite is on the corporate intranet.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

What I like about Netvibes.com UI

I'm still thinking about the perfect Social Website 2.0 UI.

Here's some of the things I really like about Netvibes (blog). Netvibes seems to have begun life as a site that collects news feeds and APIs from literally everywhere.

It's RSS features look basic but good:

In order of priority here are some comments:

1. It hides it's complexity - most options only display when you mouse over the item. Until you show an interest in something, it hides itself. It's an "intentional" design. Excellent.
2. Edit the page right there. Want to change the name of the page? Edit it right there, no going into an admin system somewhere else. Woohoo! I hope I can save the layout permanently? Can I share my layout with other people?

Some more things I like:

1. Useful ajax features (not just ajax for the sake of ajax)
2. I can reorder things as I want them.
   
3. Ease of use - for example the ability to make new tabs simply by clicking "new tab" and then include a personalized icon (sweeeet!)
   
4. Multiple language support

The only thing I don't get about Netvibes is that I don't have a use for it. It's like this amazing UI with awesome flexibility and ease of use.. but other than integrating with GMail, what would I use it for?

Some old products from Microsoft (like Commerce Server) felt and behaved like an SDK (software development kit) and nothing more. In the same way, this website feels like a demo UI of a forthcoming product… I feel like I'm waiting for the product (they sure have the UI right!)

Ok, in one of their blog posts (Netvibes launch a 1 GB personal web storage module!) they refer to "another move toward the web desktop" and that more clearly outlines what they are offering - and why I'm not responding to their offering - I don't need a web desktop. They are being all things to all people I guess. Very ambitious and very courageous.

How do they make money? 

I may not need a web desktop, but I'm loving the idea of all my email and word documents being online. With Google buying Writely (blog) and other offerings like ajaxWrite, ajaxSketch, ajaxXLS and so on we are certainly on the cusp of an online office.

Check out an old post of mine: Office 2.0 (as in Web 2.0).

Overnight in the SEO blogosphere…

Yup it's the beginning of the day here in Aussie-land. I've taken a quick look around the SEO blogosphere and here is top stuff (IMO) which was blogged overnight (courtesy of the reBlogger on SEOData):

• Blog tagging - I’m requesting a service dedicated to blog tagging…it would really take off as many bloggers are relying on their own devices…an external service could capitalise on this trend, offering a professional tag landing page, tag cloud, and tagging for blog posts.
• Google's Innovative Yet Limited Ajax Environment: GWT
• Through Building Scalable Websites I found this Cal Henderson on "How We Built Flickr"… Cal has written a book called "Building Scalable Web Sites" based on his experience with Flikr. His conversational blog style reminds me of Ivan's Coding reBlogger which I enjoyed a lot and am looking forward to Ivan restarting.

Enjoy!

The DIGG effect

We used to say the Slashdot effect didn't we? How times have changed.

DIGG is on the way up and according to some research

Digg now rivals Slashdot as the most important nonsearch driver of links to technology sites, which is leading many tech publishers to consider two things: first, how they can get users to Digg their stories and, second, how they can add Digg-like functionality to their own sites.

Google trends shows how quickly DIGG has taken the effect out of Slashdot:

Del.icio.us is also a very popular social site and you've heard of mashups. What do you get if you combine DIGG + Del.icio.us + mashups?

When will the madness stop?

Google co-op

I'm still investigating the social stuff.

Google Co-op is a platform which enables you to use your expertise to help other users find information

I read some interesting comments about Co-op in Google Co-Op - Google Embracing Social Search?

There are obvious comparisons to Rollyo, Filangy, Prefound, Wink and other social search plays, but frankly Co-op just doesn’t cut it. It feels like another Google Base to me - ambitious in its scope, but utterly bamboozling to the user. Frankly, I’m not sure that Google will ever get social search right - community-building just isn’t in their DNA.

Scrolling down to the comments for that blog post… Google gets hammered for not making the application clearer and easier to use and this comment was particularly interesting:

One thing that bothers me at times about Google is how this massive corporation sometimes appears to act like an opensource, nonprofit project.

Froogle, Base, Co-op, and others all seem to depend on other people doing most of the work, and then Google ultimately owns the data.

I did some searches in the SEOData reBlogger to see what other posts on Google Co-op I could find:

• Dynamic Implementation of Google Co-op for Search Engine Roundtable
• Is the Google Coop Spamable? Depends…
• What Do You Think Of Google Co-op? Future Spam Central?
• Google Co-op's Subscribed Links In Action

The thing is… companies like Google keep on trying until they get it right. Windows 1.0 was nothing, 2.0 was nothing, 3.0 was good, 3.1 was big, 3.11 (with networking) was massive. reBlogger is the same, we'll just keep on going through the versions until we crack it. No one currently knows how to do "social" exactly right, so it's open slather for anyone. Google will eventually get this right and I suspect it will revolve around voting.

Here is the Wink collection for Google Co-op.

Is Amazon a sleeping 2.0 giant?

Still from the amazing Steve Rubel - Amazon Launches Media Browser

Amazon's Your Media Library has the potential to become a killer social commerce application. If they simply allow users to optionally open their the tag metadata so it aggregates into a cloud, Amazon can help customers find others who share interests and build a mini social network of book, music and movie lovers. Keep an eye on Amazon. Something tells me this is just the beginning for them. They're a sleeping Web 2.0 giant.

Amazon are incredible. Really. When I think of Ajax I think about the Amazon Diamond Search. Sure it's an oldie, but it's a goodie.

Check out their stock graph: Amazon compared with the Down, Nasdaq and S&P.

Tracking future Windows releases by using reBlogger

Have you seen Google trends yet? It tracks search activity and compares it to the preceding events.

I spoke about the inverse concept in the interview I did with Robin Good reBlogger: Digg-In-A-Box. The key differences are that I would track blog posts and not searches. Why? Searches are consumer oriented, but posts come directly from the source! It's obvious that consumers don't know the actual release date, but the bloggers inside the company's software team do. Their blog activity can give hints of what happening in the team. Even if the content they post doesn't specify the data - their activity could indicate something.

So Google tracks the number of searches and maps the news event that caused the surge in interest, but I'm suggesting mapping the blog activity and project that to a future event. We sometimes see predictive activity in searching, but it's only for a very widely known upcoming event: for example Christmas.

You can use reBlogger to track the activity of a particular group within a competing company. The value is huge for a business which tracks it's competition. Most company programmers blog (and have an OPML file) so I'm thinking that all we need is to find all their bloggers, group them and then count their post activity - and then generate a graph. Watch for any irregular change (a drop or a spike) and you know something is happening. It's so easy!

You can get the reBlogger 30 day free demo and install it (requires Microsoft SQL Server or SQL Server Express).

25 Things I Learned on Google Trends (humor)

Steve Rubel does some fabulous investigations.I particularly like:

15) Blogs have caught up to newspapers

1 Digg caught up to Slashdot.

19) Interest in blogs and RSS is much higher than in podcasting and wikis

Enjoy!

Google - crack supplier?

Ah Monday morning. *Stretch* First thing of the day - I need to catch up on the SEO blog posts over at the reBlogger on SEOData.

And what do I see? Typing in a product name into Google Suggest returns suggestions for cracking the product and for key generators. Muhahaha. A lawsuit is in progress.

"Just say no to software cracks" - allegedly said by Nancey Regan.

New reBlogger.com layout - what do you think?

I've posted a LOT of items previously about good looks and feels and I've researched how everyone else does it. Now it's our turn to face the music and put our money where our (my?) mouth is.

We've got the product, got a good feature set, a great vision, great team… we even already made some sales! Now all that is missing is… the actual branded website. But no more!

We're about to launch our reBlogger.com website and we're playing with the look, feel and functionality. If you read this blog (and I know you do!) then post me a comment and let me know what you think of the new reBlogger.com new front page layout (360kb file size). Be sure to zoom in on the picture if it shows up as a thumbnail. It's all Ajaxian (Microsoft Altas) goodness.

Feeds 2.0

In a recent post (Different kinds of social/meme/news sites) I described the different kinds of news sites. One of those types is an online feed reader.

Enter stage from left: Feeds 2.0 (blog). This is their look and feel. Nice. Simple. Clear. It screams out "read your feeds on this page!" They innovate by personalizing your feed for you.

Social video? Video mashups… online

I've blogged some pretty intense (long and thoughtful… for me) posts recently:

• A tremendous new burst of creativity on the web
• Different kinds of social/meme/news sites

So I'm going a bit light hearted just before the weekend.

You may have read my We’re coming for you post where I highlight Grouper and you may know of this post Comparing The Flickrs of Video.

Well now… check out the next gen of social video. Video mashups. Eyespot. Jumpcut (blog) check out their eeeerie eye logo animation with sound, sooo cool. (It gets tedious if you leave it open in the background for 15 mins though. hehehe)

All 2.0 lists in OPML (redux)

Previously I wrote this post Get all the 2.0 lists in OPML! and showed how to translate all the links on a page into OPML. Quite cool. I gave the example of getting all the 2.0 lists into OPML. What I didn't explain (because I didn't know how to) is how to get the links out of a page easily.

Now I have found this post Link Leecher : generate a list of links from a webpage and it introduces Link Leecher. Now you can extract the links on any page!

Here is the list of DIGG sites. If you want, you can output to CSV or text file or browser. (Link Leecher is for sale.)

“don’t be evil” an albatross around Google’s neck?

I blogged about the vast spread of the internet in this post A tremendous new burst of creativity on the web and I've explored the advent of some really basic building materials - I don't jump to any conculsions about what the world will build on top of this technological marvel that is materializing.

So this post “don’t be evil” an albatross around Google’s neck, plus a great discussion of Web censorship in China comes at an interesting moment to follow on from what I wrote:

Google’s wise and experienced senior policy counsel, said at today’s Computers Freedom and Privacy conference roundtable on China, that Google’s slogan — “don’t be evil” — was developed as a lighthearted slogan to help geeks at Google express their corporate values, has now become an albatross around Google’s neck. In all seriousness, the panel discussion that followed was fascinating and underscored the deep importance of evolving a global support for the free flow of information on the Web.

I thought Google's slogan was pretty good and perhaps one of the reasons why they seem to have so much community support and why the company is so "lucky". (As a Christian I don't think it's luck, but you know what I mean)

That post ends with a curious thought:

the actions of China reveal a significant weakness in the global regulatory framework of the Internet and the Web. During the first decade of the global use of the Internet, we saw the Net spread and prosper largely through a deregulatory, hands-off model pushed by the United States through the work of Ira Magaziner. While this worked of a while, it left the Internet without any affirmative, globally recognized protections for the free flow of information. I believe we are coming to a point where we need more affirmative and binding international agreements in support of the free flow of information as a fundamental value for the Web around the world.

Regulating openness? It's like regulating morality. I wish we could, but people keep breaking the laws we make! hehehe.

I hope Google doesn't back away from their committment to be a shining light. The power of this new web is insidious in the extreme. By design it circumvents control and broken nodes… China really can't stop the flow of good and bad into their country, they can only try.

Oh drat, did I just get banned from being read in China? hehehe. 

A tremendous new burst of creativity on the web

I am just stunned at what we're seeing these days. In my previous post (134 Ajax Frameworks and Counting) I wrote about just one of these changes. That piqued my interest and I did some research on the incredible and amazing Wikipedia:

Consider these dates

First, some context. Let's look at the 1800's (not 1900's).

• 1800 Volta constructs the first device to produce a large electric current (battery)
• 1886 First motorbike
• 1886 First automobile designed and built — rather than a converted carriage, boat, or cart.
• 1889 First vehicle with seats, brakes, and steering, and included a four-stroke engine

Now let's jump forward only 83 years:

• 1971 the NASDAQ is launched - it operates entirely electronically (unlike the NYSE)
• 1972 First Intel chip
• 1977 First ATM (automatic teller machine)
• 1977 First Apple II home computer (no graphical user interface)
• 1981 First IBM PC
• 1983 Apple Lisa home computer (including graphical user interface)
• 1984 Apple Macintosh introduced
• 1985 EFTPOS Introduced (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale)

Think about what happened in the first 14 years from the first Intel chip to 1985. Quite incredible how fast things moved.

Let's focus on one of two of those dates: the first Apple computer was available in 1977 and IBM PC in 1981. Now fast forward only 8 years later when Tim Berners-Lee writes a proposal for what we know as the web:

• 1989, Berners-Lee wrote Information Management: A Proposal (it described an elaborate information management system)
• 1990 With help from Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee published a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web
• 1990 Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web
• 1991 The first web browser (which was a web editor as well) announced
• 1991 Berners-Lee posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup
• 1993 CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due
• 1993 Release of the graphical Mosaic web browser by Marc Andreessen
• 1994 Netscape Navigator launched

Think about what happened in the first 5 years! We go from proposal in 1989 to Mosaic in 1993 and Netscape in 1994.

So what happens that same year in 1994?

• 1994 Justin Hall begins to blog (it wasn't called blogging then)
• 1994 First wiki is created offline
• 1994 Yahoo! incorporated
• 1995 First wiki (WikiWikiWeb) is installed on the web by Ward Cunningham
• 1996 Xanga launched (blog or diary site)
• 1996 DoubleClick begins (advertising)
• 1996 Blog site Xanga has 100 diaries
• 1997 "weblog" term coined by Jorn Barger
• 1998 Google incorporated

I find this interesting, in those 4 years blogging has already begun and all the major players (Google, DoubleClick etc.) have already become established.

Now comes a tremendous new burst of creativity:

• 2000 RSS developed
• 2000 Tristan Louis proposes a draft of what came to be known as PodCasting
• 2001 Wikipedia begins
• 2003 Dave Winer creates first MP3 podcast on his site
• 2004 "Podcasting" word coined
• 2004 DIGG website created
• 2005 Xanga has 50 million blog diaries

Think about what has happened in the very first 11 years of the web!

As soon as the web became available people began to blog and communicate. (reBlogger was built in 2004 to collect and index web feeds by kewords and made public in 2006. heheheh.)

I want to highlight the speed of three developments

• The Apple Mac brought the PC into the public arena in 1984 and by 1993 we had Mosaic
• From Netscape in 1994 to now (2006) we have 80 million websites on the web
• From the creation of RSS in 2000 to now (2006) we have 40 million blogs

I find it interesting that blogs have come up far faster than websites. But something else is bubbling up - and it's coming up MUCH faster than anything we have seen before:

• 2005 Jesse James Garrett writes the article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
• 2006 There are already (in an unofficial count) 134 Ajax Frameworks

In only 1 year we have seen the enormous growth of Ajax and social DIGG-style websites in particular. I know the basic technology had been there since 1997 in Netscape and 1996 in Microsoft IE and Microsoft used aspects of it in their 2000 web based software, but I am tracking the moment it entered the public consciousness and therefore began to be used and developed.

Some people might draw other conclusions from these dates. I'd like to hear from you.

134 Ajax Frameworks and Counting

Found through reBlogger:

I just did a quick count of frameworks and libraries on the wiki. Turns out there are 58 in pure Javascript and another 76 with back-end support in PHP, Java, or whatever. This includes 13 for .Net, and no less than 22 for each of PHP and Java.

Overall, that’s 134 Ajax frameworks and libraries out there,

Incredible! Scary? Read more…

Different kinds of social/meme/news sites

I have been thinking about what makes reBlogger different to the other sites. I've nosed around for an analysis of the various sites and strengths and weaknesses of each offering.

Much research is focused on Ajax and the look and feel of the sites. This post is about broader strengths and weaknesses of the sites.

I think there are three ways people commonly read the internet:

• Passive news - you visit the sites you like (Yahoo, CNN) and read them. They inform you of what you need to know.
• Searching news - You go to Google and find the information you know that that you want.
• Notification of news - have a site that scans the enormous number of blogs out there and collects together the more interesting information for you.

Of the notification of news websites, I think there are four basic types:

 

• Meme sites - tracking the hot (high profile, popular) conversations on the web
• Social sites - user submitted content (sometimes highlighting esoteric past items)
• Online news reader - read your web feeds online
• News tracking sites - after submitting your keywords, view only the blog posts that interest you

 

Meme sites

Sites:

• Chuquet
• Techmeme (was tech.memeordandum.com)

Overview:

They automatically scan the news and find the "cool" topics that are in vogue in blogs around the world.

Strengths:

They find and track "conversations" about the news and watch them for a limited time period as they develop and evolve. To track an evolving political story this is a great kind of site.

Weaknesses:

• They track only a relatively small number of hot and active topics. They tend to ignore small threads, ideas or posts that are not popular enough to become memes.
• They tend to only track blogs (or information available as a web feed).
• By nature, they have a short attention span of a few days.
• 99% of the posts that a visitor would also have found useful and interesting are completely missed because they were single posts (or short threads) and never attained "hot"ness - and therefore never surfaced and became a part of the herd consciousness.
• All meme sites offer a search, but none ask me what keywords I want to see in every meme, so I am assaulted by many memes that are of no interest to me
• The memes that are displayed do not correlate to my personal interests - unless I specifically choose to visit a tech meme site (see: techmeme) or a sports meme site - otherwise I am served what the meme algorithm has determined interesting - without being aware of my interests.
• The cost of a server farm to track all 40 million blogs is very expensive - even with OSS software.

Competitive advantage:

The algorithm defining "interesting" or "hot" is the competitive advantage between these sites - the better the algorithm, the more compelling the site is.

Example of this post:

This post - although it is a useful for many people - is highly unlikely to become popular enough to become a "meme" and therefore won't enter into the herd's collective awareness as they forage for information.

 

Social sites

Sites:

• dotnetKicks
• Findory

Overview:

These sites rely on user submissions to identify stories and to vote on them. It also tracks coolness, but unlike meme sites, the visitors decide what is important, not a software algorithm.

Strengths:

• Individual posts that might be missed by an algorithm looking for coolness are more likely to be highlighted by individual visitors.
• The more users which interact with the site, the more useful the site is.
• Easy to set up, lower hardware cost.

Weaknesses:

• Too few visitors will result in too few submissions to the site. dotnetKicks has this problem, 1 submission today and 1 submission 6 days ago - nothing in between.
• No focus on "hot conversations" - for example the top post on DIGG right now is called "What the font?" (Ever wanted to find a font just like the one used by certain websites or publications? Well now you can, using the WhatTheFont font recognition system.) with 62 diggs. This site is very likely being gamed for attracting visitors and making sales.
• Social sites tend to encourage tagging by the submitter and searching for keywords, but again an enormous amount of information can be lost if the post is incorrectly tagged.

Competitive advantage:

Cheap startup costs, users submit the content (no need for an expensive server farm to automatically collect all 40 million blogs).

Example of this post:

This post, if read and valued by someone, may be highlighted as useful on such a site. But the readership of this blog is so small that it is unlikely that enough people will bookmark this post on any social site in order to raise it's profile, so it will also fail to be highlighted to the herd as suitable grazing material.

 

Online news reader

Sites:

• Bloglines
• Megite (blog)

Overview:

An online feed reader. You upload an OPML file or a list of blog feeds and the service collects those feeds regularly and you read them online.

Strengths:

Very inexpensive to run because the user submits their web feeds.

Weaknesses:

• They don't collect all the news and track it, they rely on user to list their own blogs that they want tracked. Therefore they online have a subset of the news.
• Even with this subset of blogs they may have too many off-topic posts, because they do not appear to offer keywords or filtering to track only the posts you want to track - and hide the posts that are off topic.

 

Competitive advantage:

This is probably the broadest active market containing the most people (not passive readers of sites) and these users have the simplest needs. The software is understood by the most number of people.

Example of this post:

This post is unlikely to show up on a news reader site because my RSS feed is unlikely to be in their list.

 

reBlogger sites (News tracking or news mastering)

Sites:

• SEOData (SEO reBlogger)
• TopXML (BizTalk and XML reBlogger)

Overview:

reBlogger is a combination of social and online news readers. By using keywords this site only displays the information you want to read, regardless of the source of the information. User-voting also ensures that better content is more easily discovered.

 

 

Strengths:

• A stronger emphasis on context (evolution over time exploring historical information)
• The visitor can filter the news by specifying sets of keywords to track (such as climate change, PS3 or XBox) and the software watches for those keywords and notifies the visitor when the keywords are found, regardless of which blog it was found on
• The sources can be more than blogs (such as newsgroups) and the methods of notification can be quite proactive (email etc.)

Weaknesses:

• With 50,000 posts per hour, even with keyword usage, there is a potential problem of having far too many posts showing up to be read. To deal with this problem, we encourage voting where users assist each other by voting content up and protect each other from bad content by voting content down.
• The site is useful as an online news reader for individuals users (and keywords make the reading even better), but for voting to be effective many users must use the site (the more the site is used, the better it is)
• No focus on conversations and "hot" topics (unless voted for by users)
• Because of the focus on historical data to provide context, the effectiveness is limited to the age and completeness of the archive of data

Competitive advantage:

A strong emphasis on historical context. A focus on encouraging the user to buy their own copy of the software, hopefully off-loading the demand to other people's servers.

Example of this post:

This post will automatically be collected by a reBlogger. If the user has indicated an interest in the keywords which are used in it (such as "social" or "meme&quot then it will show up for the users who have said they want to track these keywords.

Revenue streams?

In all cases the revenue stream is advertising, except for reBlogger, Chuquet and Megite:

License Megite Software: Email us for more info if you are interested in licensing Megite software to create Megite like web2.0 service.

The end

If you have read to the bottom, you're probably a very committed person… committed to building the perfect social/meme/news site. This post from a VC firm makes an interesting point that I hope will broaden your thinking beyond the very small number of people that you may now be targeting. Dave has a thought on it.

Get the 30 day demo of reBlogger (Windows only, requires .NET and SQL)

 

Share your OPML

TechCrunch has this: Share Your OPML

Share Your OPML, a new project founded by Dave Winer, is launching officially on Monday. It is a self-described “commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy.” It will gather a community of subscription lists and aggregate them in interesting and useful ways

Wow. Interesting. I wonder what Dave has in mind?!

• Share Your OPML is a Killer Attention App
• It's built on WordPress?

Tips to watch out for while building a 2.0 software company

Some thoughts to remember while building the kickest-butt social/meme/news site:

• Before requiring users insert their details, give them something when they first visit the site
• After inserting their feeds, but before requiring they insert their keywords, show them their feeds (news reader style)
• You're tempted to lay on the cool Ajax-goodies, but do you have the useful features and information they want?
• There must be almost no learning curve to get started, any complexity must be hidden for the really adventurous users (only a small % of users)
• Make sure you know where your sustainable revenue is coming from. Software sales? AdSense?
• Make sure you prepare for the worst… success! How will you avoid needing a server farm before you have the revenue to pay for it?
• Scalability. When the site doesn't scale, everyone loses. Consider using the Google limitation-invitation trick to avoid maxing out the system.
• Make lists of things to do and tick them off as you do them. Have a clear goal beforehand of where you are going.
• Design to support multiple languages
• Email subscriptions
• Have a stop-loss date by which you exit if your revenue hasn't begun coming in. Stick to it.

Do you have anything to add?

I’m baaaaaack!

Miss me? I thought I'd kick off with yet another 2.0 list (created by a venture capital firm) and follow that up with a blog post containing some of my thoughts on the different kinds of social/meme sites.