2007 April archive on youngBLOOD by Colin Daniels

Archive for April, 2007

Apr

Interview with John Battelle and Eric Schmidt

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Eric Schmidt

Schmidt announces presentation feature addition to docs and spreadsheets due go public in the next few months

“This is a testament to the strength of Web 2.0”

Microsoft and AT&T’s accusations that Google are anti-competitive – “They’re wrong! give me a break”

Mobile space “people treat their mobile phones as an extension of themselves”

Next generation phones and networks will be enormously powerful and the industry is wide open

“We’ll NEVER track users’ data” – Schnmidt on behalf of Google

View my San Francisco Photo Set

Apr

Measuring the Participatory Web

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Technorati Presentation
Bill Tancer (Hitwise) and Dave Sifry (Technorati)

Hitwise has tracked a growth rate of 668% of participatory and Web 2.0 sites over the last 2 years

Wikipedia visits outnumber Encarta by 3400:1

2.0 Photo sites account for 56% of visits to all photo related sites

Participators vs Viewers

YouTube – 0.16% participatory visits
Flickr – 0.2% participatory visits
Wikipedia – 4.59% participatory visits

(no more 80/20 rule!)

Demographics

Younger visitors view Wikipedia, older visitors edit it

18-24 year olds underrepresented when it comes to uploading videos

Gender Participation

Mostly male contributors for Wikipedia and YouTube

Predicting the next 2.0 Winner

Only took 6 weeks for YouTube to become the outright winner in the online video space
i.e Hyper adoption rates

Siffry uses the term “Live Web” (no more State of the Blogosphere)

Over 70 million weblogs tracked

Blogosphere remains strong with over 120k new blogs every day

1.5 million (58k per hour) new postings every day

21% of those stats are active blogs

22% of the top 100 most-linked to sites are blogs compared to the Mainstream Media (this has doubled since the last report)

Most “magic middle” bloggers post very frequently (at least once a day)

A-listers post twice a day on average

Most successful blogs are established and have been going for a while

88% of people in the Technorati Top 100 were either not there a year ago or have shifted places significantly (no stagnation)

37% of all blog posts are in Japanese (now the most written language in the Blogosphere)

Most people post to their blogs during business hours as well as in the evenings

There is an enormous rise in the number of people that are tagging their post
(about 14 million posts per month with tags)

Over 37% of all posts use Author-created tags

Conclusions

Blog growth continues, but more slowly

Tag usage is exploding

The Live Web is Worldwide and there continues to be growth in non-English languages

View my San Francisco Photo Set

Apr

Best of Web 2.0 Expo

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The Lost Remote: The Internet Video Revolution

Liz Gannes, Jay Adelson, Erik Hachenburg, Howard Lindzon, Marc Siry, Dirk-Willem van Gulik

The audience is different now!

[Video] content for the Online medium is different to other broadcast media and is more focused, amateur, conversational and on demand

Lower overheads and trial and error are other big differences

Short form “snackable snippet” entertainment, with a lean towards comedy works best

Video is shot with other devices, i.e iPod Videos, in mind

Television and online video is about building relationships

Trusted audiences are the key to advertising success

40% of Revision 3 bought a product because of advertising on their site

Exclusives and forced pre-roll ads smack of control and nobody wants control

The Future of YouTube?

A few players such as YouTube and MetaCafe will remain important since they have critical mass and have dealt with scalability

They will have a difficult time monetizing and converting advertising to high-end CPM and will need to seriously construct a real model in order to achieve long-term success

Building real businesses is what’s important for everybody right now

The syndication of services is ultimately the way new medium content will be distributed and monetized

Placelessness and the Advance of Micropublishing

Alex Faaborg

A common markup language for describing information between humans and computers

It’s structured data

Web Browsers are always behind at each stage in the development of the Web

Which Microformats should you support?

3 = hCard, geo, hCalendar

People are already developing plug-ins for Firefox that allow you to add take advantage of information on websites that are micro-format enabled

Not very difficult to implement from a content creator’s perspective — involves a few extra html attributes in the code

Why should developers use microformats on their sites:

Helps the Web as an ecosystem
Makes life easier for users and allows them to do things they can’t current do
“Data Pollination” — Increases your footprint on the Web and makes search more efficient

Ultimately allows for powerful content mashups and will form the basis of the Web of the Future

The Arrival of Web 2.0: The State of the Union on Browser Technology

Rael Dornfest, Brendan Eich, Charles McCathiNeville, Chris Wetherell, Chris Wilson

Web Browsers are still missing key pieces of client side functionality although they have matured unbelievably, especially with regards to cross-platform improvements

One obvious reason is the much bigger market than back in the 90’s and computers become faster and more stable

The Web 2.0 Tipping Point?
- Desktop application stagnation and broadband
- Social networking and mashups — web services and APIs
- Google!

Mobile platform is accelerating quickly and browsers are also maturing. This will lead to richer mobile applications and more emphasis being placed on them.

View my San Francisco Photo Set

Apr

Building Social Applications Workshop by Stowe Boyd – Summary

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Social = Me First
=> My passions
=> My people
=> My markets

People sense a belonging to communities on the Internet more than they do on other mediums

Semi- and asocial applications
— iTunes
— BestBuy.com
— Pandora (until recently)

After the fact:
— eBay
— Netflix
— Amazon
— Basecamp

The Buddylist is the Center of the Universe

— Network productivity (21st Century) is increasingly becoming more NB than Personal productivity (20th Century)
— Buddylists on IM clients are for the people that matter to you, even if you’ve never physically met them
— The youth are more comfortable with IM than email and often prefer it to talking to people in the real world

Me, Mine, and Market

— Successfully social apps help make physical exchanges more liquid
— People like to feel that they are querying other people rather than a database — direct market transaction

Net

— Swarmth a.k.a Wisdom of Crowds effect kicks in
— Stowe believes it’s imperative to build some ‘prominence/authority’ engine into any social app

Media and Traffic: Different Registers

— Conversation flows through networks = Traffic
— Media hold the pieces, but not the sense of the conversation
— To understand the sense of what is being said, you have to be in the flow, not in the glow

Tags

— Tags are inherently social and help you identify things through other likeminded people who classify things in the same way
— Don’t bother building ‘taxonomies’ into the system, go for ‘folksonomies’ instead

Discovery

— The primary abiding motivator: Discovery

Discovery of:

— Things (a red herring: the functional domain)
— Places (the Third Space)
— People (who fill the places) — it’s only through your connections with other people that you realize who you really are (i.e self-discovery)

Grouping and Groups

— Accept the asymmetry of nets
— Groupings: ad hoc assemblages of people with similar interests
— Groups: symmetric nets
— Recall the community of tags idea?

The Inexorable Power Laws

— What’s wrong with power?
— People are attracted to power and authority both in physical and virtual social networks and some people command authority de facto and others come out of nowhere

— Vox Populi, Vox Humana
— Gaming Systems

Reputation and Swarmth

— How to measure, how to reward?
— Harnessing nets: swarm intelligence
— All nets are not the same

Using the example of Last.fm

— Even a winner can make mistakes
— Why aren’t tags the source of all groupings? Instead, they have old-style groups
— Can’t search for groups?

Facebook

— Uses groups, not ‘groupings’
— Works well as a social app for keeping track of friends etc, where something like LinkedIn is better for business connections and work

Outside.in and The Social Tipping Point

— Where’s me?
— Where’s the people?
— Racing to market before getting the social dimension right
— Inevitably: relaunch

Blinksale

— Allows you to easily send invoices online with great social elements

Links:
Upcoming.org
Thisnext.com
Basecamp
Outside.in
Blinksale

View my San Francisco Photo Set

Apr

Hanging out with the White African

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So it was bound to happen. I couldn’t simply go the biggest Web conference in the world without experiencing a meltdown on my database server. As many of you would’ve noticed, I’ve been down for the last couple of days and have been unable to post to my blog thanks to a corrupted database which my Web host can’t explain – go figure! The last backup they managed to salvage was from a month ago so please be nice and help me catch up on all that lost commentary and traffic as I post fervently over the next few hours (what doesn’t kill your readership makes it stronger, right?)…

On a completely different note, I’m not the only “African” that’s been attending the Web 2.0 Expo and I hooked up with the White African who many of you would recognize from the name as he who trolls your blogs… hehe just kidding Erik ;-)

White African

View my San Francisco Photo Set

who is youngBLOOD?

I am currently Head of Digital for the South African division of the Trader Media Group where, amongst other things, I manage a digital department and am responsible for the commercial success of several digital products and services » more