Time for a look back at the week that was in Web 2.0. In no particular order…
1. Gizmodo’s 4-part interview with Bill
Gates ended with Bill
insisting that DRM is a good thing because it protects your medical records (or
something like that). In
part one of the interview, Gates mentioned blogging – said it was “super-important”.
Part two was…
Internertnews.com quoted me in their
article entitled Benchmark For RSS Client
Market Share?, a news story covering Feedburner’s RSS
Aggregator stats. It’s the first time I’ve been used in the media as a source, so I’m
quite chuffed. They didn’t contact me, just quoted from my blog – which is fine by me.
It’s a good write-up and it summarizes…
Great news! Prompted by my December post about RSS
Reader Market Share, Feedburner (the
company I selected as the
most promising Web 2.0 company of 2004/5) has just released their
own RSS Aggregator stats. This is exactly what I asked for, because
statistically the Feedburner data is much much bigger – and hence more
statistically significant…
I thought I’d trial a new feature on Read/Write Web, a weekly summary of news and views relating to Web 2.0 (Web as platform). Most of the links will be sourced from my linkblog, which btw I’m now managing with del.icio.us. So here are some highlights from this week:
1. Weblications is a must-read article by Adam Rifkin, that clearly explains…
Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, writes:
“Gizmodo gets handed an interview with Bill Gates. Good for them, I say – and a smart move by Microsoft. Now here’s a big challenge to traditional media: yes, anyone can run a blog and call themselves a reporter, but ‘access’ is operated almost on a…
One of my favourite articles of 2004 was a transcript of a
speech by Tom Curley, CEO of the Associated Press. In it he said that “…content will be more important than its container in this next phase [of the
Web]”. Why? Because “killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo — to name just a few — have…
Congratulations to The Robot Co-op for releasing their new goal-setting social software app, 43 Things, in time for New Year resolutions. I’ve only added a few things to my account so far. I’m still working out the balance between private and public goals, but once I sort that out I’ll add more things.
Another observation – I originally entered…
In 2005 I’ll be sharpening my blog’s focus some more, onto the topic of Web 2.0. I’ll explore what Web 2.0 means in detail in later posts, but for now a quick definition of Web 2.0 is: using the Web as a platform.
A good way for me to launch into the new year is to review the Web 2.0 successes of 2004. Here then is an informal ‘best of’ for Web…
Technical note: I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 3.14, at the request of my web host. They won’t host old MT blogs anymore, because it “requires too much server (CPU) resources”. The upgrade went smoothly (thanks to my hosts) and the only issue was that MT-Blacklist v1.6x isn’t compatible with MT 3.14, so I had to uninstall that. I plan to install…
Still on the topic of business models for RSS Aggregators, Charles
Coxhead asked a very interesting question in the comments to my post
entitled Contextual
Adverts in Bloglines in 2005. Charles asked:
“Do you think there will be any issues for Bloglines in using others content for the purposes of building context for advertising, ie. is that…
Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, wrote up a detailed response to my two
recent posts: RSS Reader Market
Share and Contextual
Adverts in Bloglines in 2005. In his post, Mark analyses Boing Boing’s web stats and draws some interesting comparisons
between Google and Bloglines in regards to Boing
Boing’s traffic:
“Nutshell: Bloglines is the 3rd…
Fascinating post by Jupiter Research analyst Eric Peterson, which outlines the Bloglines business model for 2005 – courtesy of a chat Eric had with Bloglines Chief Mark Fletcher. Eric wrote:
“The essence of his answer is “AdWords on Steroids” (my translation, appropriate given their proximity to the BALCO scandal in Northern California). The idea…
There’s always a lot of talk about market share for web
browsers, which is picking up again now that Firefox is starting to eat
into Internet Explorer’s huge lead. But there’s been little talk of who is winning
the battle for the eyeballs of RSS consumers. Mainly that’s because reading RSS feeds is
still a niche activity, but who’s to say that 2005…
It’s probably pushing
it to equate Bob Dylan’s career as an incredibly successful musician, with my nascent
career as a Blogger. But there were a couple of extracts in the first volume of
Bob Dylan’s autobiography that I, as a Blogger, identify strongly with.
The first quote comes from page 18, where Bob was outlining his early days as a…
Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg has some
predictions for 2005. The first 4 are of great interest to me, so I thought I’d list
them here along with some brief comments from moi. Plus at the end of this post, a hint
of what I’ll be up to in 2005.
1. Longhorn is no longer the answer (or even the question). There was too much
Longhorn…
Thanks to a link from Robert Scoble (who is always looking out for his readers, bless him), my issue with Technorati not indexing my blog came to the notice of Technorati Chief Dave Sifry. To his credit, Dave immediately jumped onto the case and Kevin Marks solved it today. I noticed others have been having similar issues with Technorati, so I’ll…
What, my links not good enough for you Technorati? 😉 I say that with a wink, but to be honest I’m pissed off with Technorati. My main weblog, Read/Write Web, is not being indexed there and so none of my outbound links show up in Technorati. Therefore nobody would know I’m linking to them, if they’re only using Technorati to track blogs. And let’s…
Russell Beattie’s just released a service called Mobdex, which serves up eBooks onto mobile phones. I had the pleasure of getting a sneak preview of Mobdex near the end of September, after Russ spotted a post about the Mobile Web on my blog and emailed me. So I’ve been waiting for him to release it to the public, so I can talk about it 😉 Mobdex…
Jason Kottke on web magazines:
“Before weblogs ruled the realm, a typical way to publish content online was in a Web magazine format. Suck, Feed, Netly News, Smug, Stating the Obvious, etc.”
Jason followed up in a later comment with this:
“Suck articles were finished and “professional”, which is what’s missing (I think) from my online reading these…
Back in the early 90’s I used to read William S. Burroughs books
and for a while I was quite taken with his “cut-up” method of writing. The
cut-up technique is a specialised literary form in which a text is cut up at random and
rearranged to create a new text (ref: Wikipedia). I think this was during my Surrealism
phase. Oh, it was nothing…
