What are personomies?: “personal information environment” – the information environment I have built over time, independently of any platform or system. Personomies include contacts, purchases, health records, search history, emails, rss feeds, IMs, voip calls, comments on blogs…etc…any tiny bit of data that is logged and can be tracked back to me belong in my personomy. Personomies are any digital manifestations of me.
Web 2
I have been asked to put together a short (15 minutes) presentation next week on Web 2.0 for an offsite meeting. Borrowing liberally from Tim O’Reilly’s excellent primer and with some images from Dion Hinchcliffe’s Flickr slide show on the subject, I put together the following:-
First off, Tim’s list (apparently brainstormed with John Batelle) comparing the two webs:
Web 1.0 –> Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication
Then his six principles:-
1.The Web As Platform
[Netscape vs. Google] [Akamai vs. BitTorrent] [Double Click vs. AdSense]
2.Harnessing Collective Intelligence
[Britannica vs. Wikipedia] [Amazon vs. Barnes and Noble]
“Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era.”
The Long Tail
3.Data is the Next Intel Inside
The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
–Operations must become a core competency
–Users must be treated as co-developers (Carl Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr, recently revealed that they deploy new builds up to every half hour)
5. Lightweight Programming Models
– Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems
– Think syndication, not coordination
– Design for “hackability” and remixability
Innovation in Assembly – mash-ups
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
– i-Tunes, TiVo, Google search
7. Rich User Experiences (AJAX)
–standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
–dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
–data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
–asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
–and JavaScript binding everything together
(quoted from Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path, the man credited with inventing the term “AJAX” )
List of interesting Web 2.0 sites:-
Writely online word processor and collaboration site (just bought by Google)
Google Local – mainly for the AJAX drag and drop maps
Flickr – world’s biggest photo site – just passed 100 million images, now owned by Yahoo!
Del.icio.us – first and best social tagging or “folksonomy” site
Wikipedia – world’s largest online encyclopedia – entirely written by volunteers
Digg – fairly new collaborative news sites; users votes determine what makes it to the top of the page
Housingmaps – a mashup between Google maps and Craigslist
Memeorandum – ranking blogs of popularity and providing RSS and web interfaces to the result
Technorati – blogging services site which has a range of search and analytical tools which help keep tabs on the blogosphere.
Ted’s Take on Web 2.0
More on Web 2.0, this time from Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of AOL. He argues it’s all about empowerment of the user this time round.
Ads up at FT.com
New Media Age reports big news at FT.com as ads soar. Subs were up 12% to 84,000, too.
US newspapers face up to the math
Newspapers need 100 online readers to make up for every lost hard copy reader says Rafat on paidcontent.org.
Web 2.0 Directory
A great list of links in this Web 2.0 Directory with over 900 sites identified in 50 categories.
Employee Headcounts for Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft
Gabor’s Blog has an interesting post showing how the employee headcounts of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have grown over time.
Reuters’ take on the new world
Jeff Jarvis blogs Reuters chief Tom Glocer’s keynote at the Online Publishers Association. Rafat Ali from PaidContent.org was also there. Here is his take on the speech:
The nub of the issue: what is the role of the media firms in the second decade of this century? Our roles are:
— Seeder of clouds: we help them seed our content into their creations. People will join your community and join your tent.
— Provider of tools: We need to produce open standards and interoperability…we need to make our content at the crossroads of their consumption.
— Filter and editor: We need to have the skill to spot the gold…we need to help them get mass appeal.
Adopt these three roles or risk becoming less relevant to these audiences…that, ironically, also includes the traditional online publishers now.
Brands: Brands really matter: Too much choices means not choosing at all…brands serve a filtering function. Choice means letting professionals do us, and sometimes the wisdom of crowds help us do it.
If you lose the trust of your audience…you lose the audience. Protectionism doesn’t work, but neither does surrender. Understand it, encourage it and if we do the right things, we might just make it to Web 3.0.
Business model for Reuters: Financial services still have some time before the industry blows up, so we have leeway to innovate now.
We need to have a portfolio approach to innovation wthin media industry. Some will work, some won’t work, and we need that risk taking culture within our companies.
You can download the audio of his speech here here (45 mins., 10 MB).
Google and Large Numbers
Dan Gilmour on the recent tribulations of Google’s share price.
MMO 101
For those who want to know more about MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) or MMOs for short, Wagner James Au, who has been an “embedded reporter” in the Second Life game since 2003 has written a fascinating account called Taking New World Notes which explains some of the background, is peppered with interesting statistics and offers some examples of how these worlds are already evolving into more than games. Well worth a read.