This week: ETech notes, Yahoo love-in, Web 2.0 acquisition deals continue, Hacking Web
2.0, ubiquitous storage.
ETech Takeaways
I was on holiday the week ETech occurred, so I’ve been spending the past week catching
up. My food-themed notes are
here. Also during that week the next Web 2.0 conference was
announced – October in San Francisco. I’m aiming to make it to that one!
Media Darling Yahoo
I called Yahoo the Teacher’s
Pet a few weeks ago and now Om Malik has likened Yahoo to
a mojo-rejuvenated Austin Powers! Om still thinks Yahoo’s future is “broadband and
mobile” and he is a tad dismissive of the developments that have caused Yahoo to become
the “new darling of the chattering classes” – e.g. the Flickr purchase. However I’d
suggest all of Yahoo’s Web 2.0 changes and innovations are (re)building a firm foundation
for their media strategies. In fact I wrote about that at the beginning of March: How Yahoo’s Web Services Support
Their Media Strategy.
So… what was new at Yahoo this week? Well the Creative Commons Search Engine beta had geeks
salivating – including yours truly – because it’s an enabling tool for the Remix Culture.
People can use it to find content to “modify, adapt, or build upon”. At this time
probably only bloggers will use it, but in future it may become be a key component of
Yahoo’s search engine (remember the Remix Culture is still in its infancy).
Oh and Yahoo also announced Yahoo
360°, a social networking blogging service. Silicon
Valley Watcher suggested that Yahoo will incorporate Flickr into 360, which makes
sense to me. NB: Charlene Li
has the first real look at 360.
OK, enough about Yahoo (you may be beginning to think I’m
one of their employees…I wish!).
More Web 2.0 Deals
It may only be a mini, blogosphere-oriented, bubble. But there are a ton of
acquisitions happening right now (and even more rumours!). The latest:
Topix.net got bought by a newspaper JV and IAC made a mammoth offer for Ask
Jeeves.
PaidContent.org has a fun Buyout Countdown
List, speculating about which other Web 2.0 companies are ripe for purchase. My
suggestions were del.icio.us, 43Things and Blogdigger. Steve Gillmor suggested
PaidContent.org, which isn’t a bad rumour to start 😉 Of course, Read/Write Web would also be a good new media
investment – any offers? 🙂
Web 2.0 Hacking
Looks like there was a great convention over in Taiwan recently: YAPC::Taipei (YAPC means Yet
Another Perl Conference). While I’m by no means a Perl developer, there was one session
that caught my eye – a talk entitled “Random Hacks” by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. Thanks to Journal of acme for the link.
The presentation
(pdf) includes a section about “Web 2.0 Hacking” and there are some excellent tips in
there about how to use blog APIs.
Tatsuhiko Miyagawa has
also written an O’Reilly book, only available in Japanese, called Blog
Hacks. Question: will it be translated into English? I’d love to read it.
Techy Web 2.0 Post of the Week
Daniel Lemire wrote a thought-provoking post about ubiquitous storage. This is his
prediction for the next phase of the Web:
“I bet it is going to be ubiquitous massive storage. Very soon, in 5 years, we will
reach the point where individuals will have access to infinite storage.”
I immediately thought of OurMedia (and I noticed Seb Paquet left a comment saying the same
thing). The next point that grabbed me was this:
“Smart indexing and aggregating techniques are going to become extremely
important.”
My view: infinite storage of course means huge amounts of data, so I agree that
smart indexing and aggregation are key to Web 2.0. Some of the companies already doing
this include PubSub, Findory, Rojo. Not to
mention the bigco’s, including Bloglines now that it’s owned by Ask Jeeves. As I wrote in
a post this week, RSS
Aggregation + Search is going to be a winning strategy for whoever executes it
best.
