Google Checkout

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

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.

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.

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!

English isn’t the biggest language of the blogosphere

Also 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)

I 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?

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!

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?

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.

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!

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.

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?

GeoRSS-enabled feeds

From Google Earth: Neighborhood watcher

Google Earth is a geobrowser, the first of a new breed of display tools for geographic content, akin to how web browsers display web content

…

imagine being able to mark off regions Google Earth as watch areas. If anything new pops up in the vicinity, you get an alert. You could mark out the line of sight of the view of the sea from your house, for example.

What happens next? If new construction is proposed near you, the network link will have it, and Google Earth will automatically alert you. You can then check it out virtually — and if it worries you, click through to find out more from local records.

This doesn't necessarily have to happen in Google Earth. There is no reason why future versions of my newsreader couldn't have proximity alerts for GeoRSS-enabled feeds, just as it now has alerts for specific words. But it would sure be a lot more intuitive in Google Earth.

This guy is an innovative thinker. It makes me wonder what else I should be considering while we build the next gen of reBlogger.

SplogSpot

 

Api 

Great article on Office 2.0

The Next Wave in Productivity Tools - Web Office extremely good and detailed article on the next generation!

How dependant on search are you?

I learned so much from this post:  How much do you Google? Looking at the details, the calendar, the graphs… it's amazing. The stats will be similar for me. I know that Google tracks searches (if I login) but I had no real concept of how much I google each day.

Tracking the mood(s) of the blogosphere

Want to know the current moood of the blogosphere?

Ok, here are the details: it's updated every 10 minutes and it's not the whole blogosphere, it's only the 10 million LiveJournal bloggers. But still it's cool! Well done to MoodViews - Tools for Blog Mood Analysis.

Read more about it. An excerpt:

Software that tracks mood swings across the 'blogosphere' and pinpoints the events behind them could provide more insightful ways to search and analyse the web, researchers say. The software, called MoodViews, was created by Gilad Mishne and colleagues at Amsterdam University, The Netherlands. It tracks about 10 million blogs hosted by the US service LiveJournal. "I noticed that blog posts on LiveJournal have mood labels attached," Mishne says. "We started to collect this information and noticed trends in different moods over time."

Hmmm… but in the interview I recently did, I described something similar to Moodsignals. Before I get to that, let's first read a bit about Moodsignals:

On Valentine's Day, there is spike in the numbers of bloggers who use the labels "loved" or "flirty", but also an increase in the number who report feeling "lonely". The latest addition to Moodviews, a program called Moodsignals, tries to explain match these blogospheric mood swings to current events. It identifies emotional peaks by comparing recent label usage with records of previous use. When it finds a spike, the program picks out less commonly used words from relevant blog posts in an effort to identify the cause of the emotional change.

Here is the "loved" Moodsignal in the month of February (valentines day):

Check out their various services:

• Moodgrapher tracks the global mood levels,
• Moodteller predicts them, and
• Moodsignals helps in understanding the underlying reasons for mood changes.
• Moodspotter coming soon
• Moodfeeds coming soon
• Moodstickers put your mood on your website - pretty cool

In my interview about reBlogger I described the usefulness of tracking the employee blogs for a competing company:

Mark Wilson: For example, the Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, he has a problem at the moment: he's got 27.000 employees and I don't know what percentage of them blog, but the OPML file for Microsoft is HUGE. So they have an enormous number of people blogging. Now the CTO of Microsoft cannot possibly read all of those blogs everyday, so he needs something which is smart enough to capture into themes, perhaps positive comments or negative comments, and in this way he could follow what is happening in terms of the bloggers inside the company. Somebody else, like Bill Gates, might want to track graphically, with a graph, the growing number of interest in Ajax; he might want to track what people are saying about Live.com, or Microsoft Office, the Windows version vs. the web version. If you've got a script being used on any day you'd find a 100 different opinions, and there is somebody out there who wants to track those opinions, and watch them rise or fall.

That isn't my the Moodsignal idea, here it is…

Mark Wilson: Well my idea is this, let's say that you're doing market research and you're trying to figure out what your competitor's doing. So for example let's say Microsoft is trying to understand what any competitor is doing, if you were to collect all their blogs, and you were to analyze them for upcoming themes…so say Microsoft wanted to follow the performance of a product such as Flex, a new product from Macromedia. Now, I'm just guessing this, but because companies try to encourage employees to blog in advance of a product coming up, I'm willing to bet that if you mapped out the number of posts in a particular team, say the Flex team, there would be a spike in the number of posts while they're developing their new version, and then there would be a spike just before launch the new version. So I'm guessing we haven't built the software to test this, but I'm guessing that if we mapped against product launches, and if we mapped the number of posts that that team, if we could figure out who was on that team, if we could map the two we would see a correlation. So, it's a possibility for market research all sorts of things.

Check out the rest of the interview with me.

It would be pretty cool to see some kind of Technorati style overview of the blogosphere containing moods or something useful, kinda like Technorati makes their graphs public every few months… like this one:

I'm just day dreaming here… but if they had an API and encouraged mashups and mashing of their data… wooo! My mind boggles with possibilities. I could extend reBlogger to include their API and overlay their data on top of the stuff we generate for customers.

BUT they would need to extend beyond just tracking LiveJournal. And they can't just collect the moods that LiveJournal generate, they will have to evaluate the mood of blog posts themselves. That's a fair amount of work.

I'm convinced that corporates will find this useful.

Office 2.0 (as in Web 2.0)

Web 2.0? Yawn. Office 2.0 will be a good fight to watch. The space is growing so rapidly. The number of potential customers is enormous. The need is there. The technology is there.

UPDATE:  The Next Wave in Productivity Tools - Web Office extremely good and detailed article on the next generation!

Why Google is extending RSS

Interesting…

"GData combines common XML-based syndication formats (Atom and RSS) with a feed-publishing system based on the Atom publishing protocol, plus some extensions for handling queries."

So GData is a new protocol, but "based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0." Actually at first glance it seems to be a mix of RSS and APIs

Some links: Why Google is extending RSS, GData - Google's new syndication protocol, a description

What do you think?

Times they are a-changing…

Here are some highlights that you may be interested in:

Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically:

There are many implications to this phenomenon, all of them fascinating and deeply disruptive to U.S. West Cost-centric view of the blogosphere:

- Blogging is a global phenomenon - duh! (I can’t even read a lot of the blogs that link to Publishing 2.0)
- MSN Spaces is kicking MySpace’s butt in Asia
- The cross-linking power of these personal blogs makes those of us writing on “professional” topics look like we’re sitting in a very small room
- The technology blogs that dominated the early geekosphere my soon be crowded out of the Technorati Top 100
- The provincial U.S. view of 2.0 does little to help us understand the globalization of 2.0

Would you like a blog with your phone?

You may have read this article: Can Bloggers Make Money? If you haven't then take a moment to scan it and get the feeling of their question and their answers.

In reply Dave Winer wrote:

… It's as if they asked how many miles per gallon of oats a car gets, a few years after horseless carriages came along. The question doesn't even make sense. A person with a blog is analogous to a source in the old publishing world. Sources don't get paid directly …

Dave's software approaches blogging from a slightly different perspective. For example if you look at his page, his thoughts are just that - thoughts. His blog is his own personal expression. Every day is simply a series of short self-expressions.

The reason he doesn't think of blogging as a source of revenue is simply… his revenue doesn't NEED to come from his blogs (advertising), he has a business on the side doing that.

Let's pop over to wikipedia for a moment and find out a bit about where "blogs" came from.

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz. He broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog in April or May of 1999.

Dave Winer is one of the pioneers of the tools that make blogs, he has also been involved in podcasting and RSS. I am interested in Dave's perspective because he has been involved for so long and has such a mature and long term view on things.

It says a lot about Dave that he doesn't plug his business (much) and doesn't even have adverts on his wildly popular blog to promo his business. Why? Because Dave seems to see a blog as personal expression. That makes sense of his comment that companies are masquerading magazines as blogs. He seems to think that the whole self-expression thing will only continue mushrooming until the way people express themselves and the interaction between people is remarkably different… which is his point about the uselessness of asking how many gallon of oats a car gets.

Will there be a huge increase? Yes, for sure. I look forward to when WordPress is on my XDA II Mini and I can blog thoughts throughout the day - at random and on a whim. That's when Dave's vision really happens - when we (2 billion phone users) can blog at any time, in a movie or on a date. Blogs will then be used as dashboards, whiteboards, note takers, reminders and who knows what else. With the microcontent and structured blogging things happening, the data I blog can be shown in different and more suitable visual formats. If I blog a calendar event, it displays in a calendar. If I blog a note, it looks and behaves like a note.

And meantime a lot of blogs will be for-money (magazines masquerading as blogs). That will always be the case.But when you get a blog with your phone (pre-installed) then there will be ENORMOUS economies of scale and I have no idea where that will go and what will happen at that time. But it's certainly an interesting development. 

NOTE: When this happens WordPress will need to change the blog format. We can't have a huge heading and new page and trackbacks for each and every thought. This is another difference between Dave's design and the rest of the blog software out there.

UPDATE: Matt, the co-creator and co-owner of WordPress has a blog and he has the exact feature I noticed on scripting.com - the ability to hide the heading text and all the "extra" information that readers really don't want to see. On his blog you just see the content. If you want the extra info, you open the permalink and then you get to see the full layout.

Technorati - State of the blogosphere April 2006

This just in! 

… the blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace. Technorati currently tracks 35.3 Million weblogs, and the blogosphere we track continues to double about every 6 months, as the chart below shows…

Check it out