Category Archives: Web 2.0

New York Times on Microsoft and Mashups … and Mashup Camp 6 is coming!

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You know mashups have hit the mainstream when they hit the NY Times, and this article is a nice introduction to Mashups and why they have become a key component of “Web 2.0”.    

Mashups in music are songs that combine words and/or music from 2 or more songs, and internet mashups are similar – generally they are a combination of the information from 2 or more websites or data sources into one site.   Zillow.com, for example, is an excellent mashup that takes real estate information and “mashes it” with mapping information, so you can navigate homes and prices via maps as well as in other ways.    Also in typical Web 2.0 mashup fashion, Zillow offers “APIs” or “Application Program Interfaces”   which are tools that allow simple integration of Zillow into your own website.

Mashups are not new but as they, and other Web 2.0 sensibilities, become the backbone of the new internet they represent a significant new direction in online life and computing.    Although the internet started out as a fairly open environment, the advent of big money led many websites and services to force users to pay for content and services.   “Paywalls” at sites like the New York Times, Salon, and others meant that you could not get at the stories unless you subscribed.     These paywalls are coming down now in favor of advertising supported revenue models and more open environments where websites tend to share data and even advanced technologies in exchange for the benefit of appearing as a link or an information box within other sites. 

Still confused?    Frankly, I don’t think anybody can even hope to digest the tidal waves of innovation and information that flood over the internet on a daily basis.    But if you want to understand more about mashups there is no better conference than Mashup Camp 6 coming up in in Silicon Valley in March.    David Berlind and Doug Gold started these camps a few years ago and they are a superb way to get up to speed very quickly on how mashups are …. changing everything. 

Rumors of Google and Plaxo and the McCarthy Conspiracy

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Megan McCarthy reports at Wired today that Google may be picking up Plaxo for 200 million.    A few hours later Caroline McCarthy at CNET shoots down the rumor saying it appears unfounded.

Wazzup with all these McCarthys?    Are they rival sisters, trying to outscoop or undermine each other?    Spurned same named journalistas fighting for truth, freedom, and the American way?   Is this all just a coincidence?    Are these women related to the infamous Senator from Wisconsin Joe McCarthy?   Rumor has it that …

Web 2.0 Conference

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WebGuild of Silicon Valley sponsored a great one day conference last week.   I missed the event but here are some pictures  courtesy of Reshma Kumar and Daya Baran, the Vice President and President of WebGuild who have really done an extraordinary job making that group one of the premier internet insider gatherings in the world.

This year Craig Newmark from Craigslist gave one of the keynotes.    He’s one of the most interesting folks in the internet landscape and it would really have been fun to hear his talk.      For me, the huge success of Craigslist, combined with the simple and spartan look and structure, supports the idea that the internet at a core level is about *people and information* more than anything else. 

Current TV filing for $100,000,000 IPO. Initial PE ratio = infinity!

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Today Current TV, with Al Gore a prominent investor, is filing for a big IPO.    But there is a problem.   They lost a lot of money “making” their 64 million in revenues last year.     Will they ever be profitable?  Global warming or not, I’m guessing they will be profitable about the same time that hell freezes over.

I still just don’t get it.  I understand why video clips are fun and a significant development online, but I don’t get those who express *economic* enthusiasm for online videos produced by … you and me.   As I’ve noted before about online video, I don’t understand why people think video sites can make money.   Youtube cost Google 1.6 billion but doesn’t make money.   Podtech had a brilliant, well executed, forward vision of the online video landscape.   They even had the ultimate forward looking blogger spokesmodel Robert Scoble (who has just moved to FastCompany.com and is right now hanging in Davos with the uber-economic-elite).  Despite this Podtech failed to deliver on the promise of monetizing quality content to the larger user base.   I had a chance to talk about this with John Furrier at CES.   John told me he’s still very bullish on video, but Podtech is going to focus more on a model where they’ll be producing company videos for corporate clients, helping them to leverage social media advantages.   We also talked about how hungry many big companies are for those who understand social media and want to leverage that power to their corporate advantage.    This, in my opinion, is where you’ll see most video and podcasast production efforts moving over the next few years.   The money is in leading corporate clients into the uncharted social media waters rather than trying to build website visitation and monetize clips.   The latter is a very dead end in my view.

So, should you invest in Current TV’s IPO?   Sure you should, right after hell freezes over.

Yahoo carnage coming at conference call.

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As a Yahoo enthusiast and shareholder it’s been hard to watch the company struggle so hard over the past few years only to lose ground to Google, especially because Yahoo’s social networking efforts and web 2.0 initiatives have in most ways been superior to Google’s.    Flickr is the best example of a superb Yahoo application that is more used than Google’s Picasa (which is also excellent but was late to the scene so most early adopters are sticking with Flickr, which is somewhat better anyway in my view).  

Henry Blodget at Silicon Valley Insider is reporting that Yahoo will proceed soon with the drastic layoff scenario – rumored to be some 1500-2500 people.

Human issues aside, this will likely be very good for the stock price and company’s future prospects.    Google learned early on that the key to profitability was scaling up systems without comparable scaling up of staff.   Google thus leveraged the incredible efficiency of computers to generate more profits.   Yahoo, on the other hand and especially with Terry Semel in charge, sees themselves as more of a media and content producer with all the labor intensiveness and lack of internet efficiency that approach entails.    Google was right, Yahoo was wrong.    Even Google’s own Youtube, a masterpiece of creating cheap content without staff, is struggling to monetize all the content and traffic.    

I’m oversimplifying the relationship of content production to profit here, but in general terms I continue to believe that the expression “content is king” was *never* true on the internet, and that in many ways sticking to this mantra cost Yahoo a big part of the ballgame.    Yahoo actually used Google search as Yahoo’s search tool for many years, and could certainly have aquired Google in the early days for millions of dollars rather than becoming eclipsed by Google which now has a market capitalization of about five times Yahoo.   Why didn’t they do it?    Google was “search”, not “content”, and Yahoo foolishly believed content was king.    

Content is a pawn in the big online chess game, and don’t forget it.    

Death by Google

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My Airport Codes Website, AirportCityCodes.com , was completely removed from the Google index last month.   Not at all clear why and I’m hoping it’s just a a fluke.    The site was very stable and although it was somewhat uninspired it offered airport code and other information on about 9000 airports.     Google traffic has become so critical to a website’s success that without Google a site is generally almost “dead” in terms of traffic and revenues.

The site had enough sloppy construction and odd duplication across directories – problems that I had simply left intact after taking it over several years ago – that there could be hundreds of reasons the index didn’t like the site, but usually Google reserves a complete deletion like this for a major transgression against Google guidelines.    

I’ve posted questions over at the Google forum and the answers should be interesting.  

Another shot in the Blog Revolution? Few links if by land and none if by sea.

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Louis Gray is rightfully pissed off at the way Mashable, a major tech blog, did not properly handle some stories written by Gray.   Basically they under-attributed Gray’s reporting of Robert Scoble’s PodTech departure.   I’m not familiar enough with Mashable to know if Gray is reasonable to suggest that they’ve built the whole site on this type of secondary reporting, but I certainly agree that blogs are now doing what mainstream media has done for decades – sacrificing good quality reporting in the interest of monetization.   Also I think the great and thoughful voices of several big blogs have been largely replaced by marginal writers and writing as those sites struggle to become “media companies”.  

Another defect of the new web is that linking practices and linking strategy have become very critical to success – A list sites simply don’t link out appropriately because they (correctly) view their links as valuable and (incorrectly) choose not to give that value away.   

Matt’s got a good post on this story, noting how attribution is a cornerstone of good journalism and Mashable and others should do a better job of attribution, though I’m not clear if Matt would agree that insufficient linking is part of opportunistic linking strategies more than journalistic oversight:

I wrote over there: 

…. but monetization is trumping journalism all over the place and I think the blog community should think about this a lot more than we do.

I don’t know about Mashable’s practices, but often it is marginally paid and marginally talented writers who feed the big blogs that originally had really thoughtful voices.

Also, natural linking has effectively become a “web currency” and many “A list” sites are very reluctant to link to sites outside of their frames of reference – I believe they see it as too big of a favor where even 5 years back it would have been done without a second thought.

I see this as a growing problem with many large, heavily monetized tech blogs. They are (slowly) trading profit concerns for journalism and web concerns. An inevitable thing, but a bad one

The video revolution will NOT be televised, because it’s boring.

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OK, I officially don’t get it.  Don’t get all this talk about how online video is the next big thing.  Perhaps more accurately I do get it, but don’t understand why so many bright and well connected folks don’t seem to understand that there is a very important challenge with video that makes it far less significant of an online force than most of the early adopters seem to understand.     Online video has a role to play in the information landscape, but it’s not nearly as significant as many seem to think.

Here’s a BBC story about the very clever Loic Lemeur and his clever SEESMIC project.   We’ll see more of these stories over the next few years as mainstream press slowly figures out that the early adopter online community is very enthusiastic about videos, video blogging, and pretty much any moving pictures that you can pump online.   Seesmic is a combination of video and community and thus offers the killer combo if you buy into the idea that the online world is going to revolve primarily around two key components: social networking and video.     

I’m very skeptical.   Not about the internet, which continues to rule.   Not about social media, which clearly has become and will remain a key driver of online life.  The internet has always been about people far more than technology, and the best definition of “Web 2.0” is an internet driven primarily by people and their needs rather than technology and its constraints.   But I’m very skeptical about online video, and I think the early commercial challenges of companies like RocketBoom, PodTech, and YouTube are an indication that it is very difficult to build a business or a community around video, let alone create a highly profitable environment that will drive future innovation in this space.

The biggest single challenge to video is obvious but overlooked by most of the sharp folks I see working that angle:  Most video clips are very boring.   Unlike a wordy blog entry you can quickly scan for the quick info buzz, and unlike pictures which you can review at the speed of an eye blink, with a video blog entry of video clip you’ll need to pay a lot of attention, and take up much of your attention span to glean the nugget or two of interesting content you’ll be lucky to find.     

Video online enthusiasts often agree with this, but then suggest the answer will be better video indexing services – applications that chop up the video into dialog chunks or “ideas” that are then indexed and easy to search and easier to surf.    Sure, that is an improvement, but if I want the goods I’d rather have a transcript and/or a few still pictures than a video any day, because unless you are a very slow reader a transcript is going to be easier to deal with efficiently than a video.

So, is there any room for video online?    Of course, it’ll continue as a major force for cheap little entertainment bits and perhaps even could become a minor social force as tech enthusiasts use tools like SEESMIC to communicate in a more robust and intimate fashion than you can do with writing.      However the lack of monetization potential combined with the fact that 99.99% of all video clips will bore to tears means that ultimately video will NOT create the kind of sea change in internet focus many have been waiting for.  

In fact, the video revolution is so boring it’s not even online yet, and it may never be.

The Coming Crash of 2008?

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I hope Greg Linden, who is a sharp and experienced guy, was just in a bad mood when he wrote this ominous prediction about what he sees as a bleak dot com future:

 We will see a dot-com crash in 2008. It will be more prolonged and deeper than the crash of 2000.

I’d have to say I’m not as worried and although I’d agree there is likely to be an overall decline in the sky high valuations of companies like Google, it will be partly offset by the fact that internet advertising is still in an infancy period.   Most internet money comes from ads, and the total internet ad pool is still a tiny fraction of the 500 billion spent per year on all advertising.

What, me worry?

Firefox IPO? Blodget says to bet on it.

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Market watcher Henry Blodget’s bullish on the prospects of Firefox and for good reason.   Firefox has 15% of the potentially *extremely* lucrative browser market with most of the rest resting in the hands of Microsoft.

Blodget goes so far as to suggest a merger with Netscape, leading to a mega browser company that would then partner with many and build a more aggressive marketing plan.

It’s a very good idea and something to watch carefully.

Why not Flock?

I’ve wondered why Flock has flailed away in the browser market, so far without much success.  It’s  a great product with very sharp folks behind it, and it rests on a great idea – socializing the browser.   But I think Flock was ahead of it’s time.  In the meantime websites used mashups and widgets and such to socialize themselves, leaving Flock less valuable than it would be in a world where you could not easily get cross-website activity within your existing browser.    

 Even early adopters (well, maybe not Scoble, who seems to try a new application every 15 minutes) are pretty stubborn about changing applications.     Google’s been the biggest beneficiary of this tendency which many wrongly attribute to superior search results.     Results matter, but not as much as “momentum” which kept us all using MS Office products well past their prime.

But this factor probably won’t inhibit Firefox adoption any more than it already has – Firefox is a popular application and has enormous positive buzz, and as Blodget notes they’ve done little to hype or promote it yet.