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Web 2.0 Panel at MIX06

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You couldn’t have picked a better panel for Web 2.0 than here at MIX06. Tim O’Reilly, who was/is the closest thing to Mr. Web 2.0 until perhaps Michael Arrington who was also on the panel along with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo, Royal Faros of Microsoft’s new messenger initiatives (which look really neat), and Ebay’s Adam Trachtenberg.

Of course as with all things Web 2.0 one left more confused than before the session, but that goes with the territory these days. Monetization is unclear even for companies that are cited as “successes” in the space such as delicious and flickr.

My favorite quote of the conference was Arrington to the Canadian Yellow Pages company asking how they could morph into a 2.0 company. “You are dead!” he said, I think meaning that UNLESS they changed their old style, usurous advertising fees, yellow page publishing empire would be overrun by Web 2.0s. He even felt EBAY was at risk, feeling they are protective of their 1.0 status.
I’m not so sure about that – in fact I’m increasingly skeptical of Web 2.0 as an easily monetizable phenomenon even as I am more convinced than ever that it’s a profound change in communication, information, and global community.

Web 2.0 at MIX06. Mike to Yellow Pages “You are DEAD!”

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You couldn’t have picked a better panel for Web 2.0 than here at MIX06. Tim O’Reilly, who was/is the closest thing to Mr. Web 2.0 until perhaps Michael Arrington who was also on the panel along with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo, Royal Faros of Microsoft’s new messenger initiatives (which look really neat), and Ebay’s Adam Trachtenberg.

Of course as with all things Web 2.0 one left more confused than before the session, but that goes with the territory these days. Monetization is unclear even for companies that are cited as “successes” in the space such as delicious and flickr.

My favorite quote of the conference was Arrington to the Canadian Yellow Pages company asking how they could morph into a 2.0 company. “You are dead!” he said, I think meaning that UNLESS they changed their old style, usurous advertising fees, yellow page publishing empire would be overrun by Web 2.0s. He even felt EBAY was at risk, feeling they are protective of their 1.0 status.
I’m not so sure about that – in fact I’m increasingly skeptical of Web 2.0 as an easily monetizable phenomenon even as I am more convinced than ever that it’s a profound change in communication, information, and global community.

Mix06 = Web 1.9

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OK I’m starting to grok the conference and the MS role in 2.0 …. maybe….. I got a chance to ask Tim O’Reilly to help me interpret Bill Gates’ answers to Tim’s excellent questions to Bill at this morning’s keynote. Most important to me was this simple question:
“Does Microsoft ‘get’ Web 2.0?”.

“parts of it…” was Tim’s excellent summary of the situation I see unfolding before me here at MIX.

I’m seeing good stuff – maybe some great stuff once I have a chance to play with some of the new applications like ATLAS and Windows Presentation Foundation – and I’m seeing enthusiastic MS folks who know they must come up with great aps and must overcome the Google “coolness” challenge in the developer community, but I’m not feeling anything like the energy at Mashup Camp where developers were simply on fire with new ideas that embraced the new Web with the excitement of the early years when the internet wasn’t about money, it was about … profound innovation and change.

So this is Web 1.9, and if I were an MS shareholder I think I’d be OK with that. The path to Web 2.0 riches is VERY unclear.

Atlas and AJAX

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… talking up Atlas now with the geeky demo.  If this makes AJAX more accessible rather than creating just another MS overlay to learn it could be great.
My favorite conference quote so far by the Atlas guy:
“it’s hard to type when you have 5 cups of coffee in you – fast but not accurate”

IE7 plus Vista are looking good at MIX06

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Here at MIX06 we’re getting early views of how IE7 will interface with the web.  The security items look robust yet simple.  Anti phishing is strong and “trusted sites” will show in green in address bar.  More money for verisign but that’s OK if we can get rid of the junk.

I remain concerned MS may have been so worried about all the security problems with IE that these items may eclipse what I’m more interested in at this conference – API and Web 2.0 and mashup support from MS.

MIX06 – Bill Gates on Web 2.0

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Here at MIX06 in Las Vegas we’ve learned that the MS vision of Web 2.0 remains…. unclear.   Bill Gates shared his enthusiasm for upcoming MS products like the Vista OS, and now Dean H is talking up IE7.

O’Reilly asked great Web 2.0 questions but I’m not clear that Bill sees this as the new world – more as a rapidly evolving extension of the world MS helped pioneer over the past decades.

Off to MIX06

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No Mom it’s NOT about the glitz, glamour, and free huge nightclub tabs picked up by Microsoft!  It’s WORK and SOMEBODY darn well better get down to Las Vegas and do what has to be done!

MIX06 starts tomorrow morning with keynote by Bill Gates and leads into a large number of concurrent sessions which appear to be focused almost exclusively on how MS applications and future developments can be used in online applications.   That’s OK because this is put on by MS, but somewhat ironically I think the concept here was to have a very “open” environment that tried to get feedback from the community about what they need, want, and where they are going.   I’m anxious to see if MS is sincerely interested in ….. us.

Yahoo and Google certainly are interested as evidenced by the way they interact at other conferences.   I think part of their corporate culture is to say “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!” even when that approach could threaten some aspect of the company’s revenue.  I’m not expecting this from MS but I’m hoping for greater responsiveness than they’ve shown the web community in the past.  

Sitemap submission for NMohwy.com

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Using the excellent free online sitemap generator HERE I created and have uploaded and verified a sitemap for the approx 3000 pages at NMOHWY.com.   I’ve noticed that using site:nmohwy.com currently yields almost all supplemental pages with VERY old Cache dates – usually Feb 2005.

Now and I’m trying to get Google to revisit the site.

Interestingly about 3 weeks ago when I uploaded pages that had the old names and data in a simpler database format Google pulled in the new pages and indexed them very quickly and did NOT seem to put them in Supplemental Index.   Now they are using OLD page with OLD cache dates.
The overall idea is to take the OLD pages from the time Google liked us, strip out links that are no longer relevant and other extraneous stuff, reformat some of the text in the hopes of avoiding duplicate content problems, and see if we can regain traffic for this domain and figure out why Google seems to hate the site after loving it for so many years.

The NMohwy.com Experiment

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…. and so another chapter in the saga begins….sort of….my ambitious – some would say reckless and foolhardy – attempt to regain the good graces of Google search for a part of what was once one of Google’s favorite travel websites – www.OHWY.com

This chapter began a few weeks ago when I resurrected NMohwy.com which for about 8 months has been 301 redirected to www.ohwy.com/nm/   The redirection was thanks to recommendations by Google support, Google Engineers, and a major SEO firm.    So why defy all that brilliant conventional wisdom?   

Because things still aren’t working.   So I’m taking the blogged advice of Matt Cutts and “experimenting”

The basic story is that our major travel site – OHWY.com or “Online Highways”, was downranked by Google on February 2 of 2005.   The drop in traffic was severe – about half gone, and we had to lay off people and restructure the company.   On February 1 we had about 50,000 visits from Google searches and on February 3 we were down to about 5,000 which fell over the next few months to about 500.

The site had been growing for years and we’d set up domains like NMohwy.com which were specifically targeted to states – in this case New Mexico.   After the drop we were advised that consolidating the 12 or so domains into our “mother ship” of OHWY.com was advisable and we did it.