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Mashups are more than just using big company data

There is a real mashup business model in providing infrastructure for people to create their own ad hoc mashups. I agree that, if you are basing your business plan on a creative way to redisplay some large company's data, heaven help you.

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A lot of perspectives on business opportunities for mashups are just too driven by the idea of using big company data. The real value-add in any information business is the information, hard to easily duplicate if the business is viable. So, of course, companies are not just going to give this away for you to generate revenue off of. Matthew Hurst and Greg Linden state this well:

On the other hand, the commercial examples are, as Greg points out, making offerings with no guarantees. In fact imagine the following example: data is made freely available; everyone throws in their idea; whenever a killer app emerges, the data is suddenly no longer free (I believe Alexa has been very open about this strategy). Now what do you do with your users?

There is no business model for mashups. If Web 2.0 really is just mashups, this is going to be one short revolution.

Is Web 2.0 Nothing More Than Mashups

Data Mining: Greg on Mashups

But I think this misses a larger point.

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Bud posted this on December 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Microformats and do-it-yourself vertical search aggregation

Vertical search aggregation allows sites to become known for particular topics and attain search engine visibility. To this end, it uses microformats as a glue to integrate blogging and folksonomy tagging.

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Microformats are pre-agreed, human friendly ways of formatting web posts so that machines can process them. Microformats exist for calendar entries, reviews, tagging web posts, and tagging links in link blogs. In brief, microformats are like templates in Microsoft Word but aimed at the open format world-wide web.

It turns out that some arcane features of microformats can be quite determinant in creating search engine visibility. In particular, the reltag format (for tagging blog posts) requires that tags (labels you apply to posts so that people will know how you categorize them) point at a URL that acts as a repository or definition page for the tag. This requirement means that tag repositories are likely to receive a lot of links giving them high search visibility and effectively making tag pages aggregators for vertical search on specific topics.

As I mentioned last week, technorati seems to be one of the first organizations to actively build a business model around this phenomenon. A question raised in subsequent emails is how can an individual site or family of sites use tagging and microformats to get themselves on the map like technorati. In this post, I'd like to propose a light weight mechanism for doing just that.

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Bud posted this on June 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)