Recent Entries
Nov 6: The Yahoo! System 0
Nov 5: Top Ten Web 2.0 Problems Amazon Mechanical Turk Can Solve For Me 6
Nov 4: International Web 2.0 Events 0
Nov 3: Gen Y are Content Creators 3
Nov 3: Attack of the Clones 1
The Yahoo! System
Interesting NY Times article about Yahoo!. Some key quotes:
"The idea that human judgment can improve a search engine's automatic findings is hardly new. From the dawn of the Web's history - that is, over the last 15 years - companies have invented tools to help users assess the quality and relevance of information, often by relying on others' opinions. Examples include Amazon's user reviews, eBay's feedback ratings and "trusted networks" created on many sites.
What is different is Yahoo's systematic plan to build "community intelligence" into nearly all aspects of its operation - and in turn, to entice users to spend more and more of their time on Yahoo sites, where they can see Yahoo ads. The clearest example, of many I heard about, can be seen at http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com, the beta version of a new search site."
(emphasis mine) Also a couple of great soundbites from Yahoo! staff:
"We're really about getting the average consumer to move their lives online."
"The value of the system is in the aggregate."
The word "system" was mentioned 8 times in the article - not sure if that was the NY Times reporter's particular obsession, or the word was used frequently by the Yahoo! people he interviewed.
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Top Ten Web 2.0 Problems Amazon Mechanical Turk Can Solve For Me
What is Amazon Mechanical Turk? It's a web service that enables you to "complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it."
Amazon describes it thusly: "...when we think of interfaces between human beings and computers, we usually assume that the human being is the one requesting that a task be completed, and the computer is completing the task and providing the results. What if this process were reversed and a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the results? What if it could coordinate many human beings to perform a task?"
So here's my list of Web 2.0 things I want done, that people could do for me better than computers could:
10. Get an A-Lister to link to me every day (probably can be solved by someone doing various small favours for them, on my behalf).
9. Manually filter my Rojo account at least daily - especially removing the duplicates from my topic feeds.
8. Translate all the best Asian Web 2.0 blogs into English (seriously, I want someone to do that!)
7. Insert Technorati tags and all that other microformat crap into my posts.
6. Enter my blog details into the Ping-o-matic page whenever I post something - and while you're at it, submit my posts to Digg and Slashdot.
5. Click on my Google ads from time to time.
4. Listen to all the podcasts that I never have time to listen to - and report back to me with a summary of what they said.
3. Cook me some spicy noodles, the way Jing Jing in Palo Alto makes them.
2. Turn up to the TechCrunch BBQs on my behalf and constantly remind people that I'm the Father of Web 2.0.
1. Convince a Silicon Valley company to sponsor my US work visa.
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International Web 2.0 Events
The UK has its own Web 2.0 Conference on 11 November in Brighton, in the form of d.Construct:
"d.Construct 2005 is the UK’s first grassroots Web 2.0 conference. It is an affordable, one-day event aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications. The event will discuss how new technology is transforming the web from a document delivery system to an application platform. Internationally renowned speakers will discuss hot-topics such as Ajax, using the power of API’s and the future of the mobile web."
Apparently tickets sold out within 30 minutes of registration! It's an interesting line-up, including representatives from Flickr, BBC Backstage, and Cory Doctorow discussing The Remix Economy. Apparently there will be podcasts of the sessions. (hat-tip Josh Porter)
Also, over in Canada Raincity Studios is running a workshop series on blogging and social networking - with the intriguing title Blogs n Dogs. It's being held at the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada from December 4th to the 8th 2005. (thanks Will Pate for the tip)
Great to see so much activity happening all over the world in Web 2.0! Feel free to contact me if you know of more happenings. I'm happy to be the TechCrunch of International Web 2.0 Events :-)
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Gen Y are Content Creators
This what it's all about:
"Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations."
That finding is from the Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Teen Content Creators and Consumers.
This is the current generation of kids - read/write Web babies. They're being brought up as creators and not just consumers. Oh I love the Web...
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Attack of the Clones
So the latest ruckus in tech.blogosphere is about Dave Winer's call to Clone the Google API (note the URL name). Robert Scoble wrote an enthusiastic post entitled Yahoo's new pretty maps are doomed (and so are Microsoft’s), which understandably got up the nostrils of Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny.
Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo wrote a post that outlined why Microsoft shouldn't just clone Google. He pointed out that MS and Y! APIs have different feature sets and don't necessarily use the same technology (the Google API uses SOAP), unlimited API user rates don't make business sense, and cloning shows a lack of innovation.
Like Frederico Oliveira, I'm all for competition for Google. But asking the likes of MS and Y! to clone Google isn't the way to go.
I'm now a bit sorry I kicked off this latest obsession with the word "disruptive". But in my world disruptive doesn't mean to copy your competitors, it means to out-innovate.
In summary, like Dave Winer I too would love to see unlimited or 1 million queries per day on the big companies' APIs. Wouldn't we all? However the business case issue around that is important and not easy to gloss over - perhaps I'll try and tackle that in a future post.
For now, let's stop talking about cloning please :-)
Update: Dave Winer points to a great comment by Dave Luebbert, a former development lead on Microsoft Word, in response to my comment over in Fred's blog (which led to this post here by me). Dave Luebbert's response is well worth reading - the crux of it is cloning is good for developers. I still don't see how it's good for MS or Y! to clone Google's API, but I can now see how it may be good for developers and for users of the resulting web apps. I'd be interested in what Dare and Jeremy Z think - and other developers.
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Previous Entries
Nov 3: Issues Facing Web 2.0 Today 2
Nov 2: Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0 2
Nov 1: Live.com is now live 3
Nov 1: Microsoft Announces The Live Era 1
Oct 30: Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 24-30 Oct 2005 1
Oct 29: InfoWorld story on Microsoft unveiling hosted services next week 0
Oct 27: Microsoft building a Web-based Office suite? 8
Oct 27: Branding in the Dot Oh era 2
Oct 26: Food Fight! 1
Oct 25: WebDosBeta: Spain's Web 2.0 Conference 3
Oct 25: You want disruptive? Here's disruptive... 4
Oct 24: Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 17-23 Oct 2005 1
Oct 23: Mainstreaming of Web 2.0 5
Oct 22: Web 2.0 Naysaying reaches an all-time high (or is it low) 12
Oct 21: Rethinking Email 0
Oct 21: How Memeorandum tracks the mood of news 0
Oct 21: Will mainstream people flock to Flock? 5
Oct 20: The Great Disruptive Start-Ups Search 2
Oct 19: Publishers sue Google - more evidence of 20th Century Media Delusion 0
Oct 19: Gwhizz - Google drops Gmail name in UK 3
© Copyright 2003-2005 Richard MacManus