Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 7-13 Feb 2005
What's been happening in the world of "Web two dot oh" (as Jeff Bezos pronounces it) this week? Let's find out.
First allow me to give a shout-out to my sponsor, Marqui. Their CMS software now powers the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission website.
Bloglines Sale (my last comment on it, I promise)
The Bloglines sale to Ask Jeeves continued to generate chatter in the blogosphere, including from yours truly. To sum up: Bloglines got a big payout and the public discovered that Ask Jeeves still exists, which no doubt pleased Ask Jeeves. Bonus points go to Eric Lunt from Feedburner, who predicted the acquisition way back in September 2004!
Salon Sucks
In other news, the goal-setting app 43 Things got a nice positive write-up from Salon... and 24 hours later got kneecapped by a particularly nasty piece of gutter journalism from the same publication! Shame on you Salon. Luckily for us bloggers, we can read the real story from The Robot Co-op themselves and reputable people like Jason Kottke.
Blog Books
First I noticed Blogbinders, a company that seemed to sprout out of the LiveJournal community (my write-up of them). Then John Battelle started promoting a company called Qoop, which has a slick website and a product line with "Q" stuck on the front of each product name: Q-Print, Q-Publish, Q-Search... you get the picture, very Q-Cute. John Battelle got a free book of his blog by them (he has "a buddy who is involved in Qoop"), so looks like they're getting all the buzz. Nothing wrong with that, it's great marketing by Qoop. But Blogbinders seems like a cool little company, so worthy of some attention too. Don't forget Lulu.com, they're another print-on-demand company doing good things.
Podcasting Metrics and Specialist RSS Aggregators
Feedburner posted some cool stats about podcasting. They speculated that the market for specialized RSS clients looks promising: "There's a very interesting statistic that highlights how different the RSS world will be from the web 1.0 world. Specialized podcasting clients have quickly entered the ranks of the top RSS clients..."
On this theme, bit of news this week about branded RSS Aggregators - e.g. CNET's Newsburst and Guardian newspaper.
Steve Rubel suggested that "the RSS revolution will force online news sites to evolve into aggregators to retain their eyeball base" and Dave Winer was also enthusiastic: "Bottom-line: Aggregator software and the news business, looking forward, are very tightly bound."
Techy Web 2.0 Post of the Week
I thought I'd add another feature to my weekly Web 2.0 wrap-ups. Every week I read something new about the technical side of Web 2.0 which inspires me. This week's tech article to check out is from lixo.org, a new blog. He wrote an interesting post entitled Web Services APIs. A choice quote:
"...everytime I think of a useful service on the web, I end up sketching out its API first, figure out a few interesting uses for it, and then decide if it’s worth or not implementing."
Summary
Well that's it for another week. No witty headers this week, I'm sorry. I'll bring them back next week. btw if you have any suggestions for Weekly Wrap-up, do leave a comment or drop me a line at my Gmail address (readwriteweb AT Gmail DOT com).