Google Checkout
June 29, 2006 — Mark WilsonAi caramba! Didn’t MS try this a few years ago… passport?
Everything 2.0
June 29, 2006 — Mark WilsonJust when you thought 2.0 had been buried… Everything 2.0 and they don’t have reBlogger! Scandalous!
The Spot 4 Oracle
June 20, 2006 — Mark Wilson
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?
DRM in RSS 2, OPML 2 and ATOM 1
June 13, 2006 — Mark WilsonDRM, 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 containsan HTMLa 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:
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
June 11, 2006 — Mark WilsonYesterday 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
June 10, 2006 — Mark WilsonI 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:
- Find, track and manage feeds (all versions of RSS, ATOM, RDF etc.)
- Manage types of resources differently (podcasting, blogging, flikr images)
- Aggregate the content intelligently (collate/merge a bunch of feeds together - like the engine in Windows RSS Platform does)
- Mixing (combining posts into a single feed, from across different sources)
- Filering (to remove off topic posts, adverts, Google bad neighbourhoods and profanity)
- pre-Publishing (only publish newest items, avoid duplicates)
- SEO-friendly publishing (create highly optimized content on your own website)
- SEO-friendly site navigation (insert highly optimized navigation structure including URLList and Sitemaps)
- Automation (do all of the above automatically with no administrator involvement)
- Extensive administrator tools
- 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
June 9, 2006 — Mark WilsonLet'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:
- Find a bunch of feeds you want to track
- Use RSS Mix or Feed Digest or Feed Blendr or Feed Shake to collate/merge a bunch of feeds together
- Use Feed Rinse or ZapTXT to remove the rude words and exclude off topic posts
- Use an RSS Parser (choose from list 1 or list 2) to extract posts based on keywords or topics
- 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)
- Use Feed Digest (or RSS to JS converter) to get the feeds transferred onto your website
- Automate some scripts to insert forward/backward navigation into the new pages (indexes, categories)
- 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
June 8, 2006 — Mark WilsonI 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
June 8, 2006 — Mark WilsonNow 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
June 8, 2006 — Mark WilsonYou 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))
June 7, 2006 — Mark WilsonI'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?
June 4, 2006 — Mark WilsonRegular 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
June 2, 2006 — Mark WilsonThere 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
June 2, 2006 — Mark WilsonClock 2.0?
June 2, 2006 — Mark WilsonSo 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
June 2, 2006 — Mark WilsonI 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!
June 2, 2006 — Mark WilsonWell… 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
June 2, 2006 — Mark WilsonPheed 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!
Blog search engines compared
June 1, 2006 — Mark WilsonThis is a good post by Library Clips. Read more here: Bloglines blog search engine
The relevancy is based on subscriber numbers (so anything you write may be relevant to the search term by default, as you have lots of subscribers)…Technorati bases it on incoming links (again what about the long tail, and also this is just popularity)…whereas Sphere bases it on a number of things (incoming links, subscribers, content analysis, comments, etc…), I think these results will be more relevant and also reveal posts from blogs you don’t ususally see.
As usual John does a fab job of covering the options, choices and competitors. Library Clips rocks! More details about the new bloglines blog search can be found at TechCrunch (Finally! Bloglines Blog Search)
English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere
June 1, 2006 — Mark WilsonAlso from the Technorati blog:
The following chart show the relative volume of blog posts based on the primary language of the post, on a month by month basis:
Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.
Also very interesting! That has a significant implication to any company making blog-related software… like reBlogger. 
Search for Microformats at Technorati (& Pingerati)
June 1, 2006 — Mark WilsonI missed this from the Technorati blog
I'm very pleased to announce the technology preview of Technorati microformats search for contacts, events and reviews, and Pingerati, a microformats ping distributor to support and grow the microformats ecosystem.
And from Pingerati
Microformats are tiny bits of markup in web pages that label contacts, events, reviews, addresses, geo-locations, and other commonly published chunks of information. Microformats are often published on blogs and in feeds, but are increasingly published on other types of web pages as well such as event databases, social network profiles, reviews sites, and contact information pages. Traditional ping services only handle blog or feed updates, so we've set up Pingerati to handle microformat updates on any web page.
Interesting! I had no idea there was enough information out there to warrant a search system for it?
Just how good is this design?
June 1, 2006 — Mark Wilson
Take a look at this online customization tutorial for reBlogger. The expand/collapse and Ajax panels are simply brilliant. It's all in one place and it's all intentional (meaning that you only view only what you want to see). We should have an Ajax design competition. I think Ivan would win!
