(r)evolution

Viddler on the Roof and More

A few companies of interest:

StrikeIron -- Aggregates and standardizes data: perfect for map mashups
Viddler -- Rich video: allows tagging, comments and more. If it works, it's clearly the next step.
Brightcove -- Provides video infrastructure now also a destination in its own right
SocialText -- Wiki for enterprises
NetVibes -- Website customization is prohibitively expensive. NetVibes makes it cheap
Omnidrive -- The difference with this web storage is you can build it into your own site

A Burning Need

A publisher was talking about how more than half his audience was now on other sites, thanks to RSS feeds and other forms of syndication. My first thought was that sound great, since we don't rely on an advertiing model. My second was, how on earth do we count them? The answer is Feedburner, which does a great job not only standardizing RSS/Atom feeds but also boosting their distribution and recording the results. Plus their service is free (they embed advertising in the feeds of publishers who agree and share the revenue).

Widgets-R-Us

No, we're not going back to Econ 101. A widget is a piece of code that we allow others to put on their websites, to display our headlines or even execute applications. As we're increasingly likely to find our audience on other sites, we need to move quickly past RSS feeds and onto video syndication and widgets, starting with ThinkProgress. Think about the possibilities of a widget that pumps headlines to 1 million people, then switches at our command to a call to action. As it happens, a leading widget-maker, Clearspring, is based in the DC area. It's also worth taking a close look at Dapper, which claims to make it easy to make widgets, feeds and APIs from your content.

Web Marketing 2.0

Just when I thought I knew enough about Google AdSense and search-engine optimization to ignore them for a while, new technologies bring new practices. Like making an RSS button "Add to MyYahoo" come up in search results. Or adding links to JavaScript to make pageviews count. Fortunately, Erin Lindsay will be on the case.

NewsGator Still Good Choice for RSS Reader

If ThinkProgress still wants to deploy a custom RSS reader for its audience, then NewsGator is still the best bet to build it, people in the industry say. Interestingly, USAToday recently exploded its original, one-page NewsGator-powered RSS reader and incorporated the functionality into the News page, allowing customization of sources and number of headlines alongside the editorial choices. (And BTW, all the reader interactive features you see on USAToday are powered by Pluck.)

Tech and Democracy

The assumption we share, as we surf this wave of populist technologies that allow everyman to be a published writer, photographer or filmmaker, that technology is inherently democratizing. But a historian I met noted that propaganda usually starts out in the hands of an insurgent movement, but ends up being a tool of the dominant power structure. Any parallel? Of course not. But let me make a Google search of my recorded search history to be sure.

Call It What You Want

John Battelle offers a name for JR and Tim's "transaction stack," where user information is captured so it can be used to communicate with them more effectively. He calls it a "database of intentions."

Adobe vs Microsoft

Google isn't the only company on a collision course with Microsoft. The much smaller Adobe Systems, riding the strength of its Flash technology along with design and document products, unveilled a new product called Apollo that allows developers to port dozens of applications from the Web to the desktop where they can be used offline, then synched when online. That comes on top of Adobe's Flex development framework which allows for the building of webpages rich in AJAX and Flash. Microsoft, for its part, is shipping a new, Flash-like rich media format with its new Visto desktop.

Irony of the Week

The irony of the week was hearing Microsoft and AT&T accuse Google of anti-competitive practices for buying online ad agency Double-Click. There really are reasons to be concerned, though, not just from a business point of view but a privacy point of view. While Google matches adds with content, Double-Click's cookies match ads with behavior. Not concerned about Google's reach? Search your own search history.

Can This Stuff Really Change the World?

Care2, which now claims more than 7 million members, may be the strongest example of a group that is using the web to connect people and organizations around causes. Founded in 1998, amid the first boom, it has added "Web 2.0" features to its site. But there's a noticeable difference between it and the newborn change.org, which feels like a combination of Facebook and Flikr, and gives the user more interesting things to do. We wish them both well, but change.org is a better model right now.

Accessible Ajax

Ajax can embed action in a webpage, but it has some issues. For one, you never know how it will behave, and it has to be tested in every browser. The other issue is marketing: Ajax elements won't automatically be picked up by search engines, or counted as pageviews. But as with many endeavors, doing the right thing is also good business. If you build pages with Ajax to be accessible to the visually impared, as Joel has ensured we do, you also make them accessible to search engines, according to one search engine marketing specialist.

Mashup Tech Notes

Some tech notes from specialists about building mashups, and providing your own data to others:

In terms of API protocols/styles, main choices are REST (simple, how web works, but lack of standards) and SOAP (established but complex). Momentum is with REST.
Leading data formats: JSON, XML. Momentum is with JSON, the simpler approach, but good SOAP/XML better than bad REST/JSON

Data mashup tools: pipes, rssbuss, grazr, datamashups
Scraping tools: kapow technologies, dapper
visual development tools: jackbe, proto, teqlo, qedwiki, bungeelabs
consumer tools (maps): palatial, mymaps, mapbuilder

Issues: dependencies, lack of service agreements, commerical vs non-commercial issues, copyright
Partial solution: mapstraction provides licensed, underlying backup layer

Other Companies to Watch

Curl -- Best development framework unlikely to get traction
Vidoop -- Animal shapes instead of login passwords
WebEx -- Business on demand
eSnips -- Neutral social media platform
FatDoor -- Too much information about your neighbors
JackBe -- Ajax for corporations
Zoho -- Nice online productivity suite
Twitter -- Really annoying social chatter site

What the Heck is Web 2.0?

The T-shirts handed out at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco read “Web 2.0 is ....” followed by a blank space to write in “user-generated” answers. Cute, but probably the best way to treat a term that groups a raft of disparate but related developments from the past five years or more into a buzzword for a new bubble.

That's no reason to dismiss it, however. Because those developments have produced a Web that's increasingly atomized into inter-operable parts that can be reassembled into countless new configurations. With the Web as platform, applications separate from data, and users shaping both, the possibilities are virtually limitless. As with the first bubble, more companies will fail than succeed, but not before another seismic shift has occurred. When the way people exchange information fundamentally changes, it affects a lot of things, including politics.

Here's a great video look at how we got here.
 

There is a lot more punditry about Web 2.0 out there, but here are some of the characteristic tools and ideas being lumped under that umbrella, some new and some rooted in the early days of the Internet:

• Social media – The trend that has received the most press, with countless sites like Flikr and Digg tapping users to improve the value of data by contributing, ranking, editing, distributing. Now new frontiers for collaboration: a Utah legistator used a wiki to open the process of a bill going from committee to floor. Can a community of experts benefit from the wisdom of crowds?
• Syndication – Some types of publishers are starting to find the majority of their audience interacting with their content on other websites. Widgets are the new standard tool after video syndication and RSS feeds; we need all three.
• Mashups – Have come a long way since someone put the San Francisco Craig's List apartment listing on Google Maps - Now they are penetrating businesses and getting toeholds in government. With rich mapping software and new data aggregators, this offers huge potential for our social and political scientists.
• The Long Tail - If you have a technology that makes it easy and cheap to reach all the people who like documentary films, you may have just created an aggregate market that's as big as the one for the number 1 blockbuster.
• Open outsourcing – The web services business model has come into its own, with vendors offering services through completely open APIs (interfaces) that allow you to access your data however you want, and often pay-as-you-go. Examples: Salesforce for CRM; Amazon for Web hosting and some applications; even Google whose free tools are now a realistic alternative to Microsoft Office for a small organization.
• Rapid application development - Ajax is everywhere, and Ruby on Rails is the most popular development framework. Contrast the traditional software development cycle with developers at Flikr who have been known to build and push out new applications 30 mins apart, testing user reaction, then modifying.